The theme for MAKE Vol. 18 (on newsstands and in bookstores on May 18) is about building a sustainable future at home. The articles include geeked-out gardening tips (like an Arduino-controlled automatic indoor garden called the Garduino, micro-irrigation, and worm composting) and lots of energy related projects (like how to make a Tweet-a-Watt so you can twitter your electricity usage, and other ways to measure and reduced power usage in your home).

One of the projects in the magazine I'm looking forward to making myself is the solar powered hot tub heater. Eric Muhs, the author, built a 3' x 3' plywood box, painted it black, drilled a couple of holes in a corner, and dropped a 100 foot coil of cheap black vinyl hose inside. The ends of the hoses go into the water, and a solar-powered pump moves water through the coils. The cool thing Eric's design is that the pump stays off when it's dark or cloudy, preventing the system from cooling the hot tub water.

Eric says, "On a sunny day, it works great, and the water returns to the tub 2 or 3 degrees hotter than it left. That may not sound like much, but it adds up. The basic rule of thumb of this system: if it's the kind of day when your parked car is hotter than the outside air when you get in, you'll get heat."

Make Vol. 18 -- building a sustainable future at home

wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on '25 Microchips That Shook the World,' including such classics as the Signetics NE555 Timer, MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (Apple II, Commodore PET and the brain of Bender) and the Intel 8088 Microprocessor. Quoting: 'Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology clichés to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

artistic tanks
fairy doors
new islington
interactive floorplans
50 strange buildings
12 moving building facades
archidose

previously on web zen:
architecture zen 2008
Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

On the latest FMCG vid segment, Jeri explains how to build and use a linear heater to bend Plexiglas. To make the heater, she used little more than some aluminum U-channel stock, the heating element from a hair dryer, plaster of Paris, and a benchtop power supply to fire the element.

The Fat Man and Circuit Girl

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I wasn't at all sure what to expect yesterday when I went to a conference in honor of the 100th anniversary of the US's Copyright Act of 1909. After all, that law was superseded by the Copyright Act of 1976, and so it hasn't even been in effect for 33 years. However, the program was organized, in part, by Eric Goldman and Pamela Samuelson, and had some really big names on the speaker list, so I figured I'd at least check it out. Looking over the schedule, I figured I'd sit in on a few sessions and probably head out. However, the program actually turned out to be so interesting, that I stuck around for almost the entire thing (had to duck out for a bit at one point). Bill Patry joked that only a bunch of lawyers could get excited to discuss a law that was "repealed" 33 years ago, but what was so interesting was how much of the discussion was really about what's going on today.

The summary? Copyright law is so screwed up that even if you put a significant number of the top copyright scholars and students in an auditorium for a day, they'll disagree on almost everything, and only agree that the system is a total mess. Even simple questions like "how should copyright be handled on blogs" created a collective shoulder shrug, with everyone effectively admitting that copyright law has no answer for such basic questions. That should worry people. If the intention of copyright is to "promote the progress of science" then it shouldn't be so incredibly ambiguous and contentious. All in all, it seems to reinforce the point that copyright law has been stretched and twisted in so many different ways over the years, that it may be fundamentally broken. Basically, copyright law is adjusted every so often not based on any look at whether or not it actually promotes the progress, but based on whatever new technological innovation comes along that throws some legacy providers' business models into doubt. That industry freaks out, and politicians respond with some patch that protects that industry, but has little to nothing to do with actually promoting progress.

This goes all the way back throughout history. One speaker pointed out that the big innovation of the 1909 copyright was compulsory licensing on mechanical rights. This was put into place for one reason: fear about player pianos and how they would dominate the market and destroy the need for musicians. Within a matter of decades, the player piano market was effectively gone... and yet, these massive changes designed solely to deal with the player piano have stuck around ever since. Now apply that same story to basically every other technological innovation, and that gets you copyright law.

If there was a key theme running throughout the conference, though, it was on the single biggest change that the '76 Act brought into play: switching the copyright system from opt-in to everyone-automatically-in (not even to "opt-out" realistically speaking). In the terminology of copyright lawyers, in the '09 Act you had "formalities" to get copyright. In the '76 Act, you don't. While it was heartening to hear an awful lot of support for the idea of moving back to an opt-in system (i.e., if you want copyright protection, you need to proactively register/add a notice to get it, rather than automatically getting it on everything at the moment of expression), there was plenty of disagreement. Registrar of copyrights Marybeth Peters (who has a long history of supporting worrisome expansion of copyright law) kicked off the day by talking about why it was a good thing to switch to automatically in, because the old system resulted in too many questions about whether or not something was in the public domain.

Later on, Jon Baumgarten, who also participated in crafting the '76 Act, berated supporters of an opt-in system, saying that having practiced under it, it was only good for the lawyers, because everyone spent all of their time trying to determine ways to prove that someone had screwed up registering their copyrights, and thus the end result was lots of works accidentally fell into the public domain. On this last point, Peters concluded her remarks with the rather stunning statement "I'm so glad that copyright law no longer allows so much stuff to get into the public domain." (I'm paraphrasing the exact statement, but it was close... hopefully video will be up shortly and I can get the exact quote).

Think about that for a second. Yes, the context is important: her problem was mostly with items getting into the public domain because of confusion in the registration process, but it suggests a mindset that says "the public domain is bad." Later speakers pointed out that the difficulty of putting a copyright on creative works was actually a feature of the system, intended by the Founding Fathers to be difficult on purpose, because they believed how important it was to have a large and fruitful public domain.

Also, what was stunning was how much the "old guard" such as Peters and Baumgarten insist that an opt-in system can't work because it was such a mess under the '09 Act. They seem to be confusing the '09 implementation with the entire idea of opt-in. Sure, things were a mess before '76, but perhaps the problem was with the specifics of the "formalities" rather than with the concept itself. And, they don't even seem to acknowledge that modern technology could (and, in fact, should) change the entire thinking around copyright and how any sort of registration/opt-in process might work. And, in fact, David Nimmer's final keynote suggested that new technological solutions (he discussed a hypothetical system amusingly named "the panopticon") has shifted his thinking from being totally 100% against formalities to now believing that an opt-in system absolutely makes sense.

This post is long enough, even though there were plenty of other interesting discussions, but I did want to bring up three separate points that were interesting:

• Bill Patry (whose blog is seriously missed) tried to hammer home the point that it's absolutely ridiculous that Congress doesn't ever look at copyright law in terms of whether or not it promotes the progress, and totally trashed anyone (including Supreme Court Justices) who seem to think that the "to promote the progress..." part of the Constitution is meaningless preamble, even noting that in 1909 the legislative history made it quite clear that anything that did not promote the progress was outside the scope of Congress's power. It's sad that both Congress and the Supreme Court now seem to ignore this point.
• International trade agreements are evil when it comes to copyright. Sorry, but it needs to be said. There was a lot more talk about whether or not certain changes in copyright law would keep us in line with either the Berne Convention or TRIPs (and soon, ACTA!) than about whether or not it made sense. Basically, these trade negotiations, often pushed by industry reps without considering consequences for the public, have locked us into a narrow range of bad options. We simply can't do what's best for society and creativity, because we agreed to be bound by some really bad trade agreements. No wonder the industry loves them. They get to put a stranglehold on pertinent discussion (does this promote the progress?) and force people into discussing something entirely separate (does this violate our trade agreements?). It gets everyone focused on the trees and missing the forest.
• There's a lot of bubbling concern about conflicts between copyright law and the First Amendment. I'd mentioned how often this issue seemed to be coming up lately, and this event was no exception. While the old guard again insists this matter is settled and there's absolutely no conflict between the two, a large number of scholars disagree, and point out that it's a big open question, and some earlier rulings conflict and leave open some big loopholes to be challenged in court. Expect this issue to get a lot more play in the coming years.

All in all, a very interesting event that generated lots of thoughts and discussions.

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A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Germany has been experimenting with ways to infuse biopolymers with different kinds of metals. Finding some success with their tests on spider silk, the team was able to improve the tensile strength of the fibers, increasing the amount of energy required to break a strand as much as ten times. "Spider silk is not a practical engineering material, but materials scientists are trying to produce artificial fibers that mimic its properties. If they succeed, the result could be super-tough textiles. Knez thinks the technique has more immediate potential for toughening other biomaterials such as collagen. 'Mechanically improving collagen using our technique might open several new possible applications, like artificial tendons.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ScienceDaily is reporting that an electronic nose developed by NASA for monitoring potential leaks on the ISS may be able to sniff out brain cancer. "The electronic nose, which is to be installed on the International Space Station in order to automatically monitor the station's air, can detect contaminants within a range of one to approximately 10,000 parts per million. In a series of experiments, the Brain Mapping Foundation used NASA's electronic nose to sniff brain cancer cells and cells in other organs. Their data demonstrates that the electronic nose can sense differences in odor from normal versus cancerous cells. These experiments will help pave the way for more sophisticated biochemical analysis and experimentation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While it's certainly not true for everyone who uses file sharing systems, plenty of people do actually use them as a "try before you buy" system. As such, it certainly makes sense to put links on file sharing systems to take them to sites where they can purchase the digital version if they really want to. Yet, apparently, Amazon doesn't like the idea of converting unauthorized downloaders into authorized purchasers, as it demanded that Coda.fm remove links to the purchase pages on Amazon.com and also killed off Coda.fm's affiliate account. It's difficult to see any rationale for this at all. This was a way to convert people into paying for the files. Why would Amazon want to block that?

Somewhat related to this, it appears that Google is now blocking some custom searches set up by torrent tracker sites to help people find torrents via Google's custom search engine. Given that the response to The Pirate Bay verdict has actually focused a fair amount of attention on Google as being able to "do the same thing," perhaps this is an attempt to try to back away from that. If so, that's rather disappointing. Google claims its goal is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." An awful lot of that information is found via torrents -- and plenty of that is perfectly legit and authorized.

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Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Steven's leveled up his pizza stone by building a cheap, effective refractory brick enclosure in his oven that lets him attain very high temperatures and kick-ass pizzas.

You're going to pre-heat to 500F. But how do you know when the stone is ready? You could give it maybe 30 minutes and hope for the best. Or, splurge a little. A $45 infrared digital thermometer is not only a fun toy, it's the perfect way to assess surface temp from a safe distance.

Open the oven and quickly shine the beam onto the stone every 15 minutes. Any more often than that will a) let more heat escape, and b) lower your spirits. Compared to when I pre-heated the pizza stone all by its lonesome, getting the stone up to 470F when surrounded by the brick house took 30 minutes longer. Makes sense, you've just added twice as much ceramic or terra cotta to the mix.

How To: build the ultimate, cheap home pizza oven

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Molly sends us this clockwork study desk built by naturalist John Muir while at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1861-1863:

I invented a desk in which the books I had to study were arranged in order at the beginning of each term. I also made a bed which set me on my feet every morning at the hour determined on, and in dark winter mornings just as the bed set me on the floor it lighted a lamp. Then, after the minutes allowed for dressing had elapsed, a click was heard and the first book to be studied was pushed up from a rack below the top of the desk, thrown open, and allowed to remain there the number of minutes required. Then the machinery closed the book and allowed it to drop back into its stall, then moved the rack forward and threw up the next in order, and so on, all the day being divided according to the times of recitation, and time required and allotted to each study.

(Thanks, Molly!)

Click for larger size. (Thanks, Sebastian, Mark K., and Stefanie.)

An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputer software models predict that swine flu will likely go pandemic sometime next week, but flu chips capable of detecting the virus within four hours are already rolling off the assembly line. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which has designated swine flu as the '2009 H1N1 flu virus,' is modeling the spread of the virus using modeling software designed by the Department of Defense back when avian flu was a perceived threat. Now those programs are being run on cluster supercomputers and predict that officials are not implementing enough social distancing--such as closing all schools--to prevent a pandemic. Companies that designed flu-detecting chips for avian flu, are quickly retrofitting them to detect swine flu, with the first flu chips being delivered to labs today." Relatedly, at least one bio-surveillance firm is claiming they detected and warned the CDC and the WHO about the swine flu problem in Mexico over two weeks before the alert was issued.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A whole bunch of people have been sending in varieties of the story that Google has been sued by a guy named Erich Specht, who holds a trademark on the term "Android Data," supposedly for Android Data Corporation, the company he apparently runs. Google recently applied for a trademark on "Android" in association with its mobile operating system, and had it rejected, due to worries over confusion with Specht's trademark. Based on that, Specht is now suing Google and pretty much anyone who's ever mentioned the possibility of partnering with Google and using the Android OS (over 40 companies are listed).

It's a bit surprising that Google wasn't more sure of the name before launching it's operating system, but even then, the lawsuit (and the trademark rejection) seems odd and troubling. First... I can't seem to find any evidence online of Android Data Corporation doing anything. In order to hold a trademark, you're supposed to be using the mark in commerce. At best, I can find a parked homepage, and one random listing in a directory. It's hard to see how that's "use in commerce" though perhaps there are technology businesses out there that don't involve having a webpage. Second, it's hard to see why the trademark application was rejected. What this guy is doing (developing software and hosting websites) seems wholly unrelated to a mobile operating system, and not at all confusing. It seems quite unlikely that anyone would confuse the two at all. Chances are that Mr. Specht sees this as a chance to cash in, and get Google to pay up.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

A Stanford team that's studying the public's knowledge of, and response to, H1N1 flu, has a survey and they're looking for willing participants to fill it out. Here's team member Marcel Salathé:

There is a possibility that the situation might develop into a pandemic if the virus continues to spread around the globe. The news media report excessively about this threat, and while health officials urge people to stay calm, there is an increased level of anxiety in the population.
Models have predicted that when a disease breaks out, changes in behavior in response to an outbreak, and in particular in response to information about an outbreak, can alter the progression of an epidemic. While this makes intuitive sense, there is no good data to test such a hypothesis. One of the major problems is that emotional reactions and behavioral response to an epidemic is generally assessed quite some time after the epidemic has fizzled out."

Short version: They're trying to figure out whether the info dump about H1N1 flu that you're getting from the media and the Web might really be enough to educate us all right out of a pandemic. I know that theory has come up in the comments threads on my previous flu postings. Let's help find out it if it works!

Take the survey here

EDIT: Marcel Salathé answers a couple of reader questions from the comments thread here. First, about when the results will come out and how you can see them:

There are a number of options. We will collect data while the epidemic runs its course - how long that's going to take is unpredictable, so I cannot really say more about the timeline - we just don't know yet. But we're constantly monitoring the data, and once we start finding interesting patterns we will certainly publish those quickly and make them open access. Feel free to publish my Stanford email address, and people who want to the results can send me an email."

Second, are Boing Boing readers completely screwing up the data by virtue of their savvyness? Salathé says it's a concern, but he doesn't think it will mess things up too badly, and he needs the volume of response more:

I am relatively confident that once we have a large enough sample we will get a good feeling for the average level of concern in the population. Yes, it might be that the ones responding to the survey are not the ones most panicky. On the other hand, one could also make the argument that people who are absolutely unruffled and calm might not be bothered to take the survey either. There can always be bias in any direction. In principle, any online survey has the potential for bias (by the fact alone that the survey is online) - but with a large enough sample one can avoid most of the problems regarding bias."

Boing Boing also isn't the only large-volume return place Salathé has published the survey link, so he's confident his results won't be all-BB, all the time. He does say that if you've got suggestions on more places to publish the survey link that are likely to be BB's polar opposite, you should contact him.

I'm having the damndest time figuring out the APIs to these two web services. I just want to post a picture. I already have code that does multipart forms, for Flickr and the now-defunct Pownce. These guys seem to be doing it in a non-standard way. Anyone with a clue?

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that as the European Parliament elections loom StudiVZ, Germany's largest social networking site, has opened up to political parties for election campaigning. That is, if you aren't the Pirate Party. "The other political parties were allowed to have a special account to show they are an organization and not an individual. The Pirate Party, however, was not allowed to have one and instead operated on a standard user account registered by an individual. StudiVZ noticed that the Pirate Party account was not a "real person" and despite it having a thriving network with hundreds of followers, it was summarily deleted. This means that it is impossible for the Pirate Party to have a presence at all on the largest social networking site in Germany."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Download the MP4 here, or watch on YouTube.) Today's edition of Boing Boing Video is an animated short by Giles Timms -- "Manifestations" stars a cartoon critter named Mr. Chip who seeks anime love in a psychedelic, ever-morphing virtual world. The music is by Welsh composer Ceri Frost. Mr. Chip also stars in a mini Flash game which you can play here.

RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic).

---

BB VIDEO Q&A: ANIMATOR GILES TIMMS

BBV: Where are you based, and what do you do?

Giles: At the moment I live in Santa Monica, LA and attend the Animation Workshop at UCLA's Department of Theater, Film and Television. So I'm a student in the MFA program, but I also work freelance, such as the recent Deathcab for Cutie "Grapevine Fires" video with Walter Robot Studios.

BBV: What is the story behind this lovely animation?

Giles: That it's important for us to find love in this world, whoever and wherever we may be. And that love can exist between the most unlikely of characters, such as the cartoon creature Mr. Chip and the Tadahiro Uesugi inspired girly girl. Love knows no boundaries.

BBV: I love the cute little boxy central character. Who is he, and what's his story?

Giles: The little green guy is Mr. Chip. He originally appeared as the central character in a mini puzzle flash game that I made. Mr. Chip is quite small and unassuming, but he has the heart of a lion and isn't afraid to go after what he seeks. And he can be very resourceful in a MacGyver sort of way. It was these qualities that led to his development as the main character in Manifestations.

(Interview continues after the jump)

BBV: What are some of the sources of visual or cultural inspiration that drive your work?

Giles: Visually I'm inspired by work that is textural, stylized and painterly. So for animators I like Yuriy Norshteyn, Igor Kovalyov and Koji Yamamura. I also reference a lot of comic book artists and illustrators, such as Rhode Montijo, Mike Mignola and Ashley Wood for similar stylistic inspiration.

Culturally, history and its motifs are important so that my work can seem grounded in something real even if quite surreal. I'm particularly inspired by history that shows us the indomitable human spirit rising above tragedy.

Recently I've met lots of people both in LA and at UCLA who have helped me find my voice as an artist and filmmaker but the four biggest influences have been Ceri Frost, Walter Robot, Celia Mercer and Howard Suber. Ceri is a Welsh composer who has been very generous with his music and support, both of which have helped me grow as an artist. I also had the good fortune to take a class from Bill, of Walter Robot Studios, at UCLA and work first hand with him and Chris on their 'Grapevine Fires' music video. Celia Mercer is the Area Head of the MFA program at UCLA and has been very supportive of my trials in animation and filmmaking. Also, Howard Suber, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, is an amazing guy whose lectures, anecdotes and insights inspire me as an artist (I like to think of him as the Yoda of UCLA).

And lastly, my girlfriend =)

BBV: What are you working on now?

Giles: Another animated short with music by Ceri Frost, for a song called 'Dead All Along' with dancing bones and skeletons. And trying to graduate in June!

Seeing the first-time Twitter user experience reinforced an idea that's been lurking in the background. Since the magic of Twitter is, theoretically, in its limits, perhaps they should have a limit on who can join and under what circumstances. Perhaps before you can create a new account you have to name 20 people with Twitter accounts who you want to follow. They could be celebrities if you want, or spammers -- then at least the recommended users could be tailored to your interests. The algorithms that suggest new feeds kick in, and they are well understood, once you have a few seeds to get started. The one-size-fits-all approach obviously isn't working.

This is really cool. According to ScienceDaily, group of researchers at University of Washington have come up with a formulation of artist's ceramic powder to replace 3D printing media, which can cost $30-50 per pound. They are distributing their recipe online for free (which can produce a pound of material for less than a dollar). The pots pictured above were made in a 3D printer using their ceramic mix.

About five years ago, Mark Ganter, a UW mechanical engineering professor and longtime practitioner of 3-D printing, became frustrated with the high cost of commercial materials and began experimenting with his own formulas. He and his students gradually developed a home-brew approach, replacing a proprietary mix with artists' ceramic powder blended with sugar and maltodextrin, a nutritional supplement. The results are printed in a recent issue of Ceramics Monthly. Co-authors are Duane Storti, UW associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Ben Utela, a former UW doctoral student.

The formula the team is using can be found in this article in Ceramics Monthly.

3-D Printing Hits Rock-bottom Prices With Homemade Ceramics Mix [Thanks, Alberto!]

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coondoggie writes to tell us that the Federal Trade Commission has backed off of the new Red Flag Rule designed to protect consumer information yet again. Complaining about cost of implementation, the enforcement date of the rule has been pushed back to August 1, 2009 to give businesses and institutions time to implement identity theft prevention programs. "The FTC, federal bank regulatory agencies, and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) issued the Red Flags Rules as part of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act of 2003. The final rules require financial and credit institutions that hold any consumer account, or other account for which there is a reasonably foreseeable risk of identity theft, to develop and implement an Identity Theft Prevention Program for combating identity theft in connection with new and existing accounts, the FTC said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plenty of folks have noted that the Justice Department has been the landing place for a number of RIAA lawyers. Some have suggested not to get too worked up about this, given that the Obama administration's ethics rules supposedly forbade those lawyers from being involved in issues related to their former work. However, it looks like the limit on these guys is actually quite narrow and for a very short period of time. We'd already noted that the highest ranking former RIAA lawyer, Thomas Perrelli, in his Senate confirmation hearings, said he hoped to use his position to increase intellectual property enforcement from within the Justice Department.

Now, Pro Publica, an online investigative reporting operation, has published the ethics agreements signed by Obama administration appointees, including Tom Perrelli's agreement, which appears to only preclude him from working on issues that impact his former clients for one year. Also, it seems pretty narrowly focused on the specific clients he worked for, but not other aspects of the same industry. In other words, in less than a year, he can certainly start helping the RIAA from within the Justice Department -- and his Senate testimony suggests he's interested in doing so. That's not quite the ethical separation we were led to believe would exist in the administration.

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I'm doing some work with a Twitter app that wants my username and password so I needed an account to test with. I created one, and accepted the 20 users that they suggested. This is what I saw:

http://tr.im/keiv

There's a lot of spam in there, and little that's coherent. This is the best they could find? Are they even watching?

Not quite the Stargate Project, but then again, you're not going to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in the process. This quick introduction to setting up and monitoring a webcam on an iPhone or iPod Touch shows just how easy it is. Though some of the components in this tutorial are platform-specific, you could easily swap them out with ready alternatives.

How to View your Webcam on your iTouch or iPhone

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bowman9991 writes "James Cameron's first movie since Titanic, his upcoming science fiction epic Avatar, has a budget pushing US$200 million and enough hype to power a mission to Mars. Now it appears the 3D technology he created to turn his vision into a reality, the key to Avatar's success or failure, may be habit forming. Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, said it is entirely possible Cameron's 3D technology could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2D movies. Cameron himself believes 3D viewing 'is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn't' and that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten its impact."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bowman9991 writes "James Cameron's first movie since 'Titanic', his upcoming science fiction epic 'Avatar', has a budget pushing US$200 million and enough hype to power a mission to Mars. Now it appears the 3D technology he created to turn his vision into a reality, the key to Avatar's success or failure, may be habit forming. Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, said it is entirely possible Cameron's 3D technology could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2D movies. Cameron himself believes 3D viewing 'is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn't' and that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten its impact."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

As with every spring, the rains fall, the sun shines, and I remain hopelessly inept as a gardener. Or, maybe, "inept" isn't quite the right word. "Lazy" and "impatient". There, that's the ticket. So, despite fantasizing repeatedly about the wonderful life we would lead if only we got around to putting in some vegetables this year, my husband and I have never gotten around to putting in some vegetables. At best, we keep the lawn mowed and free of vehicles on blocks.

But that may be changing because, last week, Baker brought home a copy of The All New Square Foot Gardening guide, a book written by a retired engineer, which manages to make home veggie patches appealing to both my laissez-faire approach to plant life, and Baker's (who is, himself, an engineer) tendencies towards efficiency-obsession and Maker glee. The book promises to help you grow more, in less space, with less work. OK, I'm game.

The basic idea is that most people try to garden like they're making a miniature farmstead---with wide rows, hills and furrows, plowed into the earth of your backyard. And, frankly, all that adds up to a pain in the ass. Tilling sucks. Your dirt probably isn't ideal for growing things. You get weeds that need to be dealt with every day. The watering process wastes water and usually ends up with some plants drowning and other plants parched. And all you want is a freakin' salad.

Square-foot gardening, on the other hand, is all about eliminating those problems. Instead of tilling the dirt and pumping in fertilizer, you build a big box, put a liner on the bottom, and fill it with a mixture of peat moss, vermiculite and compost. Great soil. And no weed seeds to sprout up.Because you make the box small enough to reach everything without stepping in the dirt, your soil stays aerated. Because you don't have to weed, you can grow plants from fewer seeds, closer together, with each box broken down into neat, anal-retentive grids. The idea of a garden that can be plotted out on graph paper is already making Baker salivate.

The watering solution is particularly slick. Instead of moving around a sprayer that never seems to successfully dampen the full area you've aimed it at (and chucks water onto places that don't need it), you hook up a pipe system to your box and screw in the hose. Plant stuff than needs lots of water closer to the pipe, and stuff that needs less further away. Then you can turn the water on (at a lower pressure than you'd use for spraying) and let it trickle down.

I'll be honest, as the wife of an engineer, I end up poking a lot of fun at the hyper-planning, "let us sit down and work out the numbers before we toast that bread" mindset. But it's all in fun. I promise. You engineers can be as detail-oriented as you want to be, as long as you keep offering up great solutions like this.

Image of a nicely gridded-up square foot garden courtesy shygantic, via a Creative Commons license.

I first saw Howie Woo's work on Neatorama, but then quickly spent way too much time on his site checking out all his killer (get it?) crochet projects, from dynamite to ray guns, to cigarettes. This guy has talent! And a wacky sense of humor, which is a mighty fine combination IMHO. (Be sure to check out his homemade videos!)

This Canadian native describes his work as "crochet creations inspired by life's fun oddities," and if his blog is to be believed, he's a crochet newbie who hasn't even been crocheting amigurumi for a year. Dude, did I mention he's got talent?! His work has inspired me to pull out my Visual Crochet how-to book and to give learning crochet another chance!

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Wired is reporting that Microsoft is releasing the most secure version of Windows XP ever created, but only if you are the US Air Force. "The Air Force persuaded Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide it with a secure Windows configuration that saved the service about $100 million in contract costs and countless hours of maintenance. At a congressional hearing this week on cybersecurity, Alan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, shared the story as an template for how the government could use its massive purchasing power to get companies to produce more secure products. And those could eventually be available to the rest of us. Security experts have been arguing for this "trickle-down" model for years. But rather than wield its buying power for the greater good, the government has long wimped out and taken whatever vendors served them. If the Air Force case is a good judge, however, things might be changing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the side effects of hybrid vehicles -- a positive one, for most people -- is quieter operation traditional vehicles in some situations. Less vehicle noise sounds like a good thing, unless you're blind, so a couple of senators have introduced legislation that would direct the Department of Transportation to study ways to protect blind people and other pedestrians (via Engadget) from silent vehicles. This isn't a new complaint: we reported last year about how Lotus was experimenting with putting speakers in hybrids to play engine noises, although we thought it might have been a joke. But apparently Lotus was just ahead of the legislative curve. Still, we have to wonder, is making cars noisier the best way to protect blind people and other pedestrians?

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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Andrew Alter of Trossen Robotics says:

I was working on my mech Hagetaka [a bipedal combat robot] the other night and made the mistake of grabbing at the robot to stabilize it while it was moving, and managed to graze my finger in one of the joints. It drew blood and immediately reminded me that working with these types of servos was an entirely different ballgame than your standard hobby servo. With that in mind, we put together a little demonstration video of just how powerful these servos can be! Enjoy!

RX-64: Just one more weapon in Skynet’s arsenal

In this episode of Make: Talk, we'll be joined by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, authors of The Urban Homestead. Kelly and Erik grow food, keep chickens, brew, bike, bake and plot revolution from their 1/12th acre farm in the heart of Los Angeles. They are keepers of the popular DIY blog, Homegrown Evolution. Their first book, The Urban Homestead, a primer on urban self-reliance, was released by Process Media in May of 2008. The New York Times magazine called it "Home Economics as our great-grandparents knew it."

We'll also present some news from the world of making, and our favorite tricks, tips, and tools of the week. Be sure to call in for prizes that we'll award during the program! The number is (646) 915-8698.

Below is the show player, where you can listen to the live program on Friday, and to past episodes.

Make: Talk on BlogTalkRadio

Business and Open Source pundit Matt Asay picked up on a recent attempt by Sun's Dan Baigent to chronicle the ten largest failures that took the tech giant from a $200 billion peak valuation to the recent buyout by Oracle for a mere $7.4 billion. Unfortunately, Dan only made it to number three on his list before Sun pulled the plug. How long will it take corporate overlords until they finally realize that broad level censorship and trying to control the message are far more harmful than just becoming part of the discourse? "I find that I tend to learn much more from my failures than from my successes. I'd be grateful for the chance to learn from Sun's, too. Sun, please let Baigent continue his countdown. It allows Sun to constructively chronicle its own failings, rather than allowing others to do so in less generous terms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ArtWerk drew this map of Europe, titled "Where I Live." Be sure to read the lively debate over at Flickr, both in the annotated notes and the comments.

Writing over at TOC, Andrew Savikas recently announced:

I'm happy to announce that more than 160 O'Reilly books are now available on Kindle (both Kindle 1 and Kindle 2), and are being sold without any DRM (Digital Rights Management).

...

There's a lot of overlap between the kind of early-adopter crowd likely to buy a Kindle and the audience for our books. So it's no surprise that we received a lot of requests to add O'Reilly books to the Kindle store, and it's great to finally be able to get those readers the books they want. We expect to add another 100 or so titles in the coming weeks; those have needed a more detailed analysis of the table content to identify good candidates.

Andrew has more detail on which books became available, and some background on why we held back on publishing books on the Kindle as long as we did: Over 160 O'Reilly Books Now in Kindle Store (without DRM), More on the Way

And shortly after that announcement, one of our Make: Books, Getting Started with Arduino, appeared on the Kindle store. This comes only a couple weeks after we announced this book was available on the iPhone, so now you can get started with Arduino anywhere that's convenient.

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je ne sais quoi writes "The April data is out for the Net Applications 'market share' survey of operating systems (more accurately referred to as a usage share). For the first time, Linux has reached 1%. This past month the Linux share increased by 0.12% which is well above the average monthly increase of 0.02%. Historically, the Net Applications estimate of market share has been lower than that of other organizations who measure this, but the abnormally large increase reported this month brings it closer to the median estimate of 1.11%. For other operating systems, Windows XP continued its slow decline by 0.64% to 62.21%, whereas Vista use is still increasing to 23.90%, but its rate of adoption is slowing. That is, this month's increase of 0.48% is well below the 12-month average increase of 0.78% and down from the peak rate of increase of 1.00% per month on average in January-February 2008. The total Windows share dropped to 87.90%. Mac OS use decreased slightly to 9.73% from 9.77%, but usage share of the iPhone and iPod Touch combined increased by 0.1%."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've talked in the past about the importance of various "safe harbor" rules that help maintain that liability for any sort of lawbreaking is actually placed on the lawbreaker, rather than any tool provider/middleman used to break the law. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need such safe harbors, because it should be obvious: the person who breaks the law is guilty, while the person who makes tools that are used to break the law is not guilty. That's just common sense... but apparently not common enough. We were already quite troubled by the Supreme Court's surprising and disturbing decision to create a new "inducement" standard that chips away at the DMCA's safe harbors, but no such "inducement" standard has been applied to Section 230's safe harbors, which protects service providers from most non-copyright law-breaking by users.

Until now, that is.

Eric Goldman points out that in a recent ruling in a lawsuit between the New England Patriots and Stubhub, it appears that a court has suddenly come up with an "inducement" standard for section 230 as well, despite most other court rulings (with one major exception) giving pretty broad protections to any service provider. In this case, which we've discussed before, the New England Patriots were furious that season ticket holders might resell some of their tickets on StubHub, and even had a court force StubHub to hand over the names of its users (despite this being a massive privacy violation that also violates StubHub's own terms of service). While an earlier ruling indicated StubHub was protected by the section 230 safe harbors, this latest ruling says it's not, in part because StubHub knows about, helps and profits from ticket scalping on the site.

This is troubling for a variety of reasons. It still involves putting liability on a party who doesn't actually break the law. Furthermore, when using a standard that involves looking at whether or not the company profits from the law breaking, you effectively kill all safe harbors. Any commercial service provider, almost by default, will profit in some way from the law breaking, but that shouldn't make them liable for it. Also, as we've see quite clearly with the inducement standard encroaching on DMCA safe harbors, those on the other side of lawsuits will continue to try to stretch and twist the contours of what counts as "inducement." If this stands, it will create massive potential liabilities for online service providers, and there will be lots of expensive lawsuits. The end result will be a greatly chilled market for innovation.

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Photo from Connors934on Flickr

A few years ago, I got really into electric cars. Not enough to build one, but certainly enough for me to do a pile of research, find a free electric truck for two students to work on, and to buy another electric car that sat in my garage for a few years until another student caught wind of it and restored it. Chad worked on that car during his lunch breaks for the last month or so of his Sophomore year, and got the car running well enough to drive it in the local Fourth of July Parade. His wiki about the build was a good exercise in project management and documentation. A few months later, he had the title cleared up, bought it from me, and drove it as his daily transportation for the remainder of his high school years.

Instead of a gas tank, Electric Vehicles (EVs) have batteries. The batteries store electrical energy which is then converted into mechanical energy to turn the wheels. You can do most of the local driving you need to do with an electric car. You can charge your car while you sleep or while you're at work, and the vehicle has fewer parts than an internal combustion engine vehicle.

With the batteries in Chad's car, it's kind of like the smart grid. He can charge it with whatever system he wants, plugged into the wall, powered by solar panels, wind turbine, or by a water wheel. He can charge it when he wants, he can store the power until he needs it. If his utility company were set up for it, he could charge it at night when rates and demand are low and then store the electricity until the rates and demand are high and sell it back to the grid. The smart grid is in some senses akin to an electricity bank, where consumers can deposit and withdraw.

If Chad's car was without batteries, and plugged directly into the current "dumb grid," he could only drive it the distance of an extension cord (like an electric mower). Our houses now, for the most part, are like that electric car without batteries. If the power goes out, so does the stereo, TV, fridge, and the PS360n64.

So what's the big deal about electric cars? Well, they may be the answer to a lot of the problems that our society faces now. Take a listen to what Shai Aggassi has to say about the future and electric cars:

Shai Aggasiz is suddenly very hot. He was the covergeek on Wired recently, gave an excellent TED talk, and was on On Point the other day. His view of the role of electric vehicles ties into the smart grid, because EVs can help store the electricity that's generated at night and provide a resource for it during the day. Electric cars are likely to be an important part of the solution. I've been following that community for a few years and I continue to like what I see. There are definitely a lot of rolling science projects, but now the money is starting to arrive on the scene to allow significant progress. AMP, Advanced Mechanical Products is setting up to convert a particular model of the Saturn to electric. Of course, now that GM is getting ready to cast that line off, it isn't clear what'll happen with the project. Maybe they'll re-brand Saturn as an electric car company.

During my electric car obsession, I found a few good resources. Solo, by Noel Perrin, tells the story of the electric car and some of the industries realities and troubles in developing this technology in the 1990s. Electric Dreams, by Caroline Kettlewell, tells of a high school team who set out to convert an old vehicle from gas to electric. Jerry's EV conversion is a site that chronicles his conversion of an old Mazda. Zap Electric Cars has a number of EVs for sale, and they seem to know the quirks of the vehicles on the road. Chad and his father brought me along to what appears to have been the last Tour de Sol, a great weekend conference, workshop, rally, and auto show based around alternate energy systems. It rained all weekend, but we had a good time and got lots of information.

With electric cars, our grid gains a crucial element that it doesn't have now: storage capability. The grid we plug into today only works when power plants are generating and people are drawing juice.

With the smart grid, devices like appliances will need to be able to turn on and off based on the relative availability of power through some rules-based networked interface. We could set our air conditioner to cycle down when power is more expensive, and ramp up when rates are low. This should have the effect of reducing demand during peak times. Customers are encouraged and financially-rewarded for reducing and rescheduling their electricity use.

NPR has an in-depth study of the subject of smart grid, which is worth checking out. I found the angle on the increased capacity and how it affects green power generation to be both interesting and troublesome.

As the discussion about renewable electricity generation heats up, it seems that a lot of people are talking about transmitting this green power from the sun belt or wind belt to the country's population centers. This may not work out so well, as electricity really does not like to travel very far. Possibly a more effective way for communities to deal with their electricity needs is to conserve. Each household and business could reduce their electricity usage, then we could be more comfortable and less dependent on distant generation and transmission schemes.

Generating your own electricity at home and storing it in your plugged-in vehicle may be the shortest transmission distance we need.

---

Editor's Note: This post is part of a series of posts sponsored by GE. GE had nothing to do with the content of the article and no control over Make: Online editorial. -Gareth

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/environment/Electric_cars_and_the_smart_grid';

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Brandon sez, "I'm currently studying in Leiden in the Netherlands and upon exploring just outside the south side of town, I discovered this handsome sculpture of an arcade machine carved out of a tree trunk. The URL carved into it leads to a Dutch art group called Uitschot. For those who are unfamiliar with Dutch (not that I'm fluent), 'boom' (rhymes with 'home') means 'tree.'"'

Beeld 14: Gameboom. (Brandon)

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that since last year more than 400,000 Iranians began surfing the uncensored Web using software created for the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has been suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999. More than 20 countries now use increasingly sophisticated blocking and filtering systems for Internet content, according to Reporters Without Borders, including Iran, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The creators of the software seized upon by Iranians are members of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, based largely in the United States and closely affiliated with Falun Gong. Interestingly enough, the United States government and the Voice of America have financed some of the circumvention technology efforts, and a coalition is organizing to push for more Congressional financing of anti-filtering efforts, bringing together dissidents of Vietnam, Iran, the Uighur minority of China, Tibet, Myanmar, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, as well as the Falun Gong, to lobby Congress for the financing. 'What is our leverage toward a country like Iran? Very little,' said Michael Horowitz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute. 'Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk? It just changes the world.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce Perens writes "The World Health Organization will no longer refer to Virus A(H1N1) as 'Swine Flu,' citing ethnic reactions to 'swine,' for example among middle-eastern cultures who feel that swine are unclean. Or, is it because meat packers are concerned that people might stop eating pork in fear of the virus? WHO suggests that the public select a new name for the virus. I suggest that we all start calling it The Colbert Flu, after the comedian and fake pundit who asked his audience to stuff a NASA poll so that a Space Station module would be named after him. What can we do to make the name stick?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Videogames should be more violent, not less.

Recently on Offworld, Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol takes the occasion of J.G. Ballard's death to argue that, with his future of boredom -- of calm consumer choices and deadened emotions -- realised, that videogames are an ideal safe excursion to violence and excitement, outlets for Ballard's "vast systems of competing psychopathies." Elsewhere we took a longer look at WINDOSiLL (above), the latest Flash creation from Vectorpark artist Patrick Smith, and its magical hyper-real surreality -- certainly one of the most physically expressed worlds in recent game memory. We also saw fantastic footage of Q-games' latest PixelJunk game, showing off the interplay of its realistically modeled particle/fluid mechanics, saw Bandcamp's hidden Defender stats-graph easter egg, watched Infinite Ammo's gorgeous paper-cut planar-platformer Paper Moon in motion, and cut paper of our own to assemble adorably lethal Team Fortress 2 models. Finally, we launched a 'One Shot' series of single-serve art doses with Katamari-head jellybeans, a Super Mario graveyard, and a Nintendo Entertainment System mouse, dug on Dr. Mario Dunnys, and showed off easily one of the best bits of press swag ever put to paper, with a neo-futuristic Space Invaders Extreme print signed by original game creator Tomohiro Nishikado himself.

Greg Sadowski's anthology Supermen!: The First Wave Of Comic Book Heroes 1939-41 pulls together some of the goofiest, most innocent, most violent superhero comics ever penned, excavating rarities from the dawn of the genre when small studios set out to reinvent pulp literature in four colors.

These are heroes from an era of cheerful immorality, when masked heroes like The Clock (apparently the first masked hero) maintained secret identities as "a small time dip and drug addict;" when Yarko, Master of Magic, kidnapped evil hags and took them to hell (beating the hell out of any demons he encounters on the way) so that she can bargain with Satan to restore the girl she killed in a jealous fit; when Fletcher Hanks's demented, idiotic hero Stardust and heroine Fantomah (the first woman super-hero) fought evil with nonsequiturs and a remarkable lack of anatomical accuracy; and when a hero called "The Face" fought crime by donning a fright mask that terrified villains into confessing their bad deeds on the spot.

The forematter (a lovely, insightful, nostalgic essay by Jonathan Lethem) and the afterword (a collection of bibliographic and historical notes on each strip) make perfect bookends for the hot stuff in the middle. This is pure and unadulterated Id, the kind of thing that inspired a moral panic about the corruption of the young. It's every bit as potent today.

Supermen!: The First Wave Of Comic Book Heroes 1939-41

Dorkbot NYC is next Wednesday! Featuring the luxuriantly airborne:

justin downs: how to be creative not making art, and how to make art creatively not be itself. The projects i have typically worked on have been large scale art ventures (engineering design/fabrication of the Carbon Arc Lamp for the Starn Twins 2003 and Play the Building for David Byrne 2005,2008, 2009 two examples). Recently I have found avenues of working which allow for interesting projects that have functional utility. The last project was building a solar powered tree house in the Kenyan Maasai land. The current one is developing with the Wave Farm a semi intelligent solar powered mesh network, which will hopefully translate into tracking collars and techniques, for african wildlife.

http://www.grndlab.com

http://www.johnhenryshammer.com

Conrad Shawcross: Slow Arc III

British sculptor and Location One international fellow creates multimedia kinetic sculptures that explore the artist's interest in philosophy, science and the mysterious structures of the universe. He will present a new work which features a halogen light moving along an articulated arm inside a mesh cube and some of his earlier work.

http://www.location1.org/conrad-shawcross

Graham Smith: Social Network--A Digital Painting

I have 413 Facebook friends and in one week I saw more then 100 of them in RL. I wanted to create a work of art about virtual friends so to do that I visited them in person. I got a picture of me with lost friends, childhood buddies, ex-girlfriends, family, and people from high school I didn't talk to. I asked them about their RL friends, asked for a physical souvenir, and took their pulse to be used for a 'digital painting' of lightning bugs. The 'painting' is a wall mounted laptop running a looped program.

1937th dorkbot-nyc meeting

7pm on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Location One in SoHo.

The meeting is free and open to the public. Please bring snacks to share.

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• Lisa reviews the Flip UltraHD. But which pocket cam should you buy?

• Xeni checked out Tricaster, the future of budget broadcasting.

• The Plantronics Voyager Pro is a bluetooth headset for suits with serious requirements.

• Luxeed's U5 keyboard works on Macs.

• What would Wii do without soap? Speaking of Wii, Energizer-branded inductive Wiimote chargers are out soon.

• HP's new MediaSmart home server cuts the price, and some corners.

• THEY WANT YOUR POD.

• Would you like a letter-size touch tablet from Apple?

• A diseased light fixture, courtesy of 3D printing technology.

I've just finished Blood in the Game, the sixth collection in Brian Wood's remarkable comic book series DMZ, a nail-biting, blood-boiling story of America gripped by civil war and the cynics who profit from it.

America's civil war has its front lines in Manhattan, in the DMZ where the Free States (separatist militiamen), the USA and its military contractor, Trustwell (a stand-in for Halliburton or Blackwater) all clash. For years, Matty Roth, a roving reporter who has an on-again/off-again relationship with Liberty News (think Fox News) has cataloged the human cost of the manipulative, cynical profiteering on all sides of the conflict, but now he's even more in the thick of it than ever.

It's election season in the DMZ. New York will elect its own governor and become independent -- supposedly. In reality, it appears that the fix is in, with the USA prepared to install a "Paul Bremer wannabe" as a puppet ruler. Then Parco Delgado, a street-fighting charismatic (derided as "a cross between Al Sharpton and Che Guevara") throws his hat in to the ring, declaring himself to be the real choice of the people. Matty is swept up in populist fervor (only slightly dimmed when he discovers that the Delgado Nation has hired his estranged mother, a left-wing political operative, to run the campaign) and breaks with Liberty News just as an unsuccessful assassination attempt puts Delgado in hospital.

A story about the limits of democracy and the power of populism, about the role of the press and the bravery of the voter, Blood in the Game furthers the fantastic work that Wood has done thus far on his story set in an utterly plausible America at war with itself. This is the kind of storytelling I read comics for.

DMZ Vol. 6: Blood in the Game

DMZ Vol. 5: The Hidden War

DMZ Vol. 4: Friendly Fire

DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works

DMZ Vol. 2: Body of a Journalist

DMZ Vol. 1: On the Ground

A US Air Force officer says that America should build a military botnet and go on the offensive, so the system acts as a deterrent against future attacks. Who would be attacked? According to the BBC, "he argues that if a computer owner has failed to use anti-virus software and install the latest security patches, that machine may be a legitimate military target." Wow. So not having anti-virus software makes it okay for the military to attack any computer? Why stop there? Why not just blow the thing up, if it is indeed a "legitimate military target"? If these are the sorts of strategies that the military sees for cybersecurity -- which the officer has called "carpet bombing in cyberspace" -- perhaps we'd be better off with somebody else heading up the efforts.

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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coondoggie writes in with a Network World piece that begins "A range of companies with wireless LANs are discovering that 50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused, because Wi-Fi has become so prevalent. They look at racks of unused switches, ports, Ethernet wall jacks, the cabling that connects them all, the yearly maintenance charges for unused switches, electrical charges, and cooling costs. So why not formally drop what many end users have already discarded — the Ethernet cable? 'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner. 'By 2011, 70% of all net new ports will be wireless. People are saying, "we don't need to be spending so much on a wired infrastructure if no one is using it."' ... There is debate over whether WLANs, including the high-throughput 802.11n networks, will be able to deliver enough bandwidth." Cisco, which makes both wireless and wired gear, has a spokesman quoted calling this idea of right-sizing a "shortsighted message from a wireless-only provider. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

One person outside: But two people "inside": That's the gist of the chimera, a human being who carries the DNA (and sometimes the body parts) for two. It sounds crazy, but it happens. In fact, doctors think it probably happens more often than we realize. Unless there were some reason to test the DNA from cells in different parts of your body, you could easily be a chimera and never know it. Happy Freaky Friday, everybody.
So how's it happen? In this excerpt from my book, Be Amazing, I explained how chimeras happen, and how confusing it can be to be one.

First: Get That Meddling Sibling Out of Your Way
Imagine you're a fertilized egg, just a few days old. There you are, floating around the womb and minding your own business, when, BAM! You run smack into another just like you. Well, not just like you. But certainly close enough to be a threat. Now, you have a choice. You can roll over and let yourself be born as just another fraternal twin, or you can stand up for your individuality and absorb the interloper. Naturally, you do the smart thing, and nine months later your parents take home one healthy baby.

Then: Discover That They Aren't As Dead As You Thought
Like a horror-movie villain locked into a three-picture contract, your twin never really died. Instead, she'll end up hiding in plain sight--within your very cells--rendering you a chimera, a single human who carries the genetic makeup of two different people. Most of the time, there aren't any outward signs that your body is harboring a stowaway. But when you do notice, things get a little crazy. Take Karen Keegan, who discovered her chimera-ness at age 52. When Keegan needed a kidney transplant, she and her two adult children underwent DNA testing to figure out which kid's kidney would be the best match for mom. Surprisingly, the tests showed neither. In fact, according to DNA, Keegan's children weren't her children at all. The case confounded doctors for more than two years until, in 2000, the docs finally realized that Keegan's blood cells carried different genes from the cells in her ovaries---the long-absorbed twin was found.

Perhaps you're wondering whether chimeras can incorporate twins of two different sexes. The answer is yes, and the results are often much stranger. In 1998, Scottish doctors reported treating a teenage boy for an undescended testicle. But when they put the kid under the knife, no second testicle could be found to pull down. Instead, where the ball should have been, doctors discovered an ovary and fallopian tube. Chimera strikes again.

For some fun further reading, check out the story of Lydia Fairchild. Like Karen Keegan, Fairchild's chimeric nature was discovered after DNA tests said she wasn't the mother of the children she was pretty sure she remembered giving birth to. Unlike Keegan, however, Fairchild's kids were still young and the initial DNA test almost cost her custody.

Much like Professor Xavier of the X-Men, illustrator Michael Rogalski is locked in deadly, psychic battle with his evil, chimeric twin.

Death Metal notes an EFF report on information wrested from the FBI over the last three years via Freedom of Information requests. The report characterizes what Ars Technica calls the FBI's "Everything Bucket" — its Investigative Data Warehouse. (Here's the EFF's introduction and the report itself.) The warehouse, at least 7 years in the making, "...appears to be something like a combination of Google and a university's slightly out-of-date custom card catalog with a front-end written for Windows 2000 that uses cartoon icons that some work-study student made in Microsoft Paint. I guess I'm supposed to fear the IDW as an invasion of privacy, and indeed I do, but given the report's description of it and my experiences with the internal-facing software products of large, sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracies, I mostly just fear for our collective safety."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sebastian of little-scale posted details on how to build his, water controlled Toriton Plus instrument. The project uses Arduino, various resistors, lasers, and a machine running running software you can download from his site. This would definitely be an eye-catching music controller for live performances - just avoid tipping the bowl while rocking out!

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Sockatume writes "Yesterday, two Acer executives in Europe separately let slip details that give us a good date for the release of Windows 7. First, Acer's vice-president for Europe discussed a new product, launching this September, that will support Windows 7's touch features. Asked whether this confirmed the Windows 7 release date as September 2009, he coyly remarked that 'when it's in store it won't have Windows 7 pre-loaded.' Microsoft would probably prefer that he had stopped there, but he added: 'We won't be actually selling [Windows 7] a day before the 23rd October.' Then, Acer's Managing Director for the UK helpfully clarified that while their product will ship with Windows Vista at launch, because it is on sale less than 30 days before the Windows 7 release date, it will be eligible for the 'upgrade program' to get a free upgrade to the new OS."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There have been a number of cases recently that have tested whether various laws that protect journalists from having to give up their sources also apply to people publishing content online in forums, email groups or blogs. The latest, sent in by someone Anonymous, is taking place in New Jersey, where a woman who revealed a security breach in the software of a company called Too Much Media is being sued for slander in revealing the breach. There are numerous issues with the lawsuit, including the oddity that they're suing for slander for online comments, since slander is for spoken words, whereas libel is normally applied to the written word. It's also odd that they're suing considering the fact that they don't deny the security breach existed, but dispute the claim that customer info (including credit card details) were exposed, because they claim the security breach was brief and no info was compromised. That seems like a pretty weak defense.

However, the real battle seems to be over the attempt to determine how the woman, Shellee Hale, found out about the breach in the first place. She's refusing to give that up, claiming that she has a right to protect her sources, just like any journalist. And while Hale writes multiple different blogs, and has written for many mainstream publications (including the Wall Street Journal and Business Week), Too Much Media claims that she doesn't deserve protections afforded to journalists because she wasn't working for any real publication and is just a blogger. The article quotes someone who says that if the court sides with Hale:

"then everyone is a journalist and the privilege becomes meaningless."

I don't see how that's actually true. In fact, I'd argue the other way. It's not that it becomes meaningless, but that it becomes very, very meaningful -- especially in an era where we're looking for new ways to prop up investigative journalism. If everyone's a journalist, and everyone has a reasonable expectation that their sources are shielded, then we're much more likely to continue to root out corruption. If this protection is somehow reserved for some "special" credentialed people, then it becomes that much harder to expose corruption.

Unfortunately, it appears that the judge in the case is almost entirely computer and internet illiterate, needing to ask for explanations for a variety of things during the court proceedings. He seemed entirely confused by the very concept of people blogging for personal interest:

"Why would a guy put all this stuff on a blog? Does he have nothing better to do?" Locasio asked. "Does he get paid?"

The judge, who apparently is about to retire in a couple months, also didn't understand the difference between blogs, message boards and forums, and was apparently unfamiliar with instant messaging. It's difficult to see why someone entirely unfamiliar with the technology should be able to judge a case like this, where understanding what's happening online is crucial to understanding what the case is really about.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Arms22 built this handy display to keep an eye on departing train times. Nice idea - I can think of many occasions this would have helped me out a bunch - Train Schedule Message Board on Flickr

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Reservoir Hill writes "The NYTimes reported in their June 13, 1897 edition that 'Canadian pirates' were flooding the country with spurious editions of the latest copyrighted popular songs. 'They use the mails to reach purchasers, so members of the American Music Publishers Association assert, and as a result the legitimate music publishing business of the United States has fallen off 50 per cent in the past twelve months' while the pirates published 5,000,000 copies of songs in just one month. The Times added that pirates were publishing sheet music at 2 cents to 5 cents per copy although the original compositions sold for 20 to 40 cents per copy. But 'American publishers had held a conference' and a 'committee had been appointed to fight the pirates' by getting the 'Post Office authorities to stop such mail matter because it infringes the copyright law.' Interestingly enough the pirates of 1897 worked in league with Canadian newspapers that published lists of songs to be sold, with a post office box address belonging to the newspaper itself. Half the money went to pay the newspapers' advertising while the other half went to the pirates who sent the music by mail." The AMPA never dreamed of suing their customers, though.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We discussed Microsoft making IE8 a critical update a while back; but then the indication was that the update gave users a chance to choose whether or not to install it. Now I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes in with word that the update not only does not ask, but it makes IE the default browser. "Microsoft has a new tactic in the browser wars. They're having the 'critical' IE8 update make IE the default browser without asking. Yes, you can change it back, but it doesn't ask you if you want IE8 or if you want it as the default browser, it makes the decisions for you. Opera might have a few more complaints to make to the EU antitrust board after this, but Microsoft will probably be able to drag out the proceedings for years, only to end up paying a small fine. If you have anyone you've set up with a more secure alternative browser, you might want to help check their settings after this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vanderlin combines the power and versatility of augmented reality with vinyl records. He describes how he implemented scratch control -

So by figuring out the velocity of the records rotation and applying it to the payback of the audio you can scratch. There is some digital noise that needs to bee worked out, but sounds pretty good. Its still really hard to scratch, it takes some practice but is super fun. The next step is to figure out some nice triggers for different modes. I like the idea of not needing a turntable but the actual spinning of the record helps with the scratching and playback. I made a couple modes, one where the record is paused and you can just scratch through the song. The other looks for zero velocity for x time and then continues on with the song. If there is velocity you then are scratching and the audio is affected. I think that this project has some legs can't wait to play more.

After some further development, I could imagine this becoming a digitally enhanced substitution for traditional scratching. [via Create Digital Music]

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There's a growing roster of found-object artists working in what I call mechanical animism, an aesthetic world where the margins between the born and the made have become leaky and distinctions between humans, animals, and machines are fluid and ambiguous. One of the true masters of this genre is Belgian artist Stéphane Halleux. We've fawned all over Stephane's work here before, and with a new website and a bunch of new pieces on display there, we get to ogle all over again. I love the whimsy and humor in his work, the macabre undercurrents, and the incredible craftsmanship of the sculpture themselves. Look at the close-up images on the site and you'll be amazed at the quality of the work and the crazy detail that goes into every piece. With so many people doing this type of 21st century folk art, using similar materials of junk, found objects, antique appliances, and dead media artifacts, Stéphane's work stands out and has a charm about it that's truly unique, and I find, extremely inspiring.

Stephane Halleux

In the Maker Shed:

Device Vol. 1: Fantastic Contraption
Sale Price: $13.95 (normally $19.99)
Stéphane's sculptures are featured in this gorgeous book we sell in the Maker Shed, put together by Amy and Greg Brotherton of Device Gallery. Other artists featured include Mike Libby, Christopher Conte, Nemo Gould, and Greg Brotherton, all of whom have been covered here on Make: Online. I'm even in here; I wrote the Introduction. Device is putting together Volume II now, and I'm honored to be involved in that project as well. Some of the Device artists will be at Maker Faire, including Nemo and the Brothertons.

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theodp writes "In 2006, IBM boasted it was 'holding itself to a higher standard than any law requires because it's urgent that patent quality is improved.' On Thursday, the USPTO revealed that IBM was seeking a patent for Controlling and Using Virtual Universe Wish Lists. The product of six IBM inventors, Big Blue explained that a 'virtual wish list device determines an item in a virtual universe that is desired by an avatar.' Led by Chief Avatar Sam Palmisano, IBM is still drinking the virtual world Kool-Aid, dropping $80,000 to host a recent Second Life-based conference for 200 or so members of the IBM Academy of Technology. IBM indicated the virtual venue was chosen to avoid sending 'the wrong kind of message' (pdf) that something like a $400,000 real-world meeting might send during troubled economic times."

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These lovely, betentacled tables were designed by Chul An Kwak, a Korean designer who exhibited them back in 2007 at the Seoul Design Week.

Chul An Kwak at Seoul Design Week 2007 (via Neatorama)

I first read Steven R Boyett's novel Ariel in 1983: I was twelve years old, and I was absolutely, totally hooked.

Here's the premise: one day at 4:30 PM, the world Changes. Complex technology (anything beyond a simple machine) stops working. Magic starts working. Planes fall out of the sky, dragons take wing. Chaos wracks the world. Riots. Starvation. Murder.

Pete Garey was an adolescent when the Change hit, and he found himself on the road when his family disappeared in the chaos. He's been wandering ever since, joined now by a unicorn named Ariel whom he met and befriended while bathing in a pool. He and Ariel are more than friends: she's his familiar, his companion as he wanders the by-ways of Changed America, looting sporting goods stores for equipment, fighting off marauders, befriending other loners.

That's the setup. An adolescent hero and a unicorn and their retinue (a failed ingénue, a little boy whose father has sent him to slay a dragon, a martial artist who has figured out how to put his Society for Creative Anachronisms skills to work) get embroiled in a series of adventures, culminating on a raid against a black magician who has ensconced himself in the Empire State Building and is set to destroy the world.

The telling is flat-out brilliant. It never lets up. The characters are likable and vivid, the storytelling fast and non-stop, the tale filled with adventure, bravery, betrayal, swordplay, magic, and eleven kinds of coming of age.

I've read Ariel a good 20 times since 1983, and it's one of the few books I brought with me across the ocean when I moved from Toronto to London -- even though my copy was broken-spined and stained, I couldn't bear to part with it. For one thing, I wanted to read it to my daughter in eight or nine years.

Today, an expanded reissue of Ariel hits stores, and this is some goddamned great news. Boyett (who's been more focused on being a DJ and a podcaster of late) has added in some new material and (mirabile dictu) has written a sequel, Elegy Beach, which will be released in November.

There's a whole generation that's grown up since Ariel left print, and another generation besides, and it's good news for the future that this book is once again available to them. It's got swords and sorcery, it's got road-tripping, it's got post-apocalyptic adventures, it's got gang-war, bravery, the Smithsonian, hang-gliders, martial arts, romance, sailing and seacraft -- what more could you ask for?

Ariel

Ricoh has posted a firmware update for the CMOS-based CX1 digital compact camera. Firmware Version 1.19 rectifies the problem where the camera would shut down without retracting the lens when the battery is depleted. The update closely follows the recent CX1 firmware update (v1.16) which rectified minor operational issues.

I found this great instructable about hacking dynamo keychain flashlight into a nice 5v power supply. They use a MAX756 step-up DC-DC converter and a few other parts to get it all working. This looks like a really interesting idea for remote applications where power isn't readily available or a solar panel would be too bulky or fragile.

Now you can have a regulated power supply constantly at your fingertips with NO batteries to replace or recharge! This Instructable shows you how to modify a keychain dynamo flashlight into a lean mean supply that can replace batteries for any projects requiring quick 5 volt direct-current (5V DC) power.

More about making a Battery-free 5 volt project power

In the Maker Shed:


MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v1.2 - Build your own MintyBoost: a small & simple (but very powerful and very MAKE-like)USB charger for your iPod (or other mp3 player), camera, cell phone, and any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge.

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portscan writes "OpenBSD 4.5 has been released. New and extended platforms include sparc64, and added device drivers. OpenSSH 5.2 is included, plus a number of tweaks, bugfixes, and enhancements. See the announcement page for a full list. OpenBSD is a security-oriented UNIX/BSD operating system." As per OpenBSD tradition, of course there's a song.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While officials in neighboring Illinois are suing Craigslist for prostitution, it appears that law enforcement officials in Iowa know better. Brent writes in to note that police in Iowa have been using Craigslist as a tool to help crack down on prostitution. Of course, that doesn't make for headlines nearly as big as just blaming Craigslist...

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We recently got a look at some hard numbers related to the piracy of Demigod , a new game from Stardock and Gas Powered Games. Now, two weeks later, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has essentially declared the game a success in spite of the piracy, and reaffirmed the company's stance that intrusive DRM is a bad thing. The game's sales figures seem to bear him out. Quoting: "Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you're playing a pirated copy right now, if you're one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you're a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way. The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don't buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary — our customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Larry Lessig sez, "The Bloomsbury Academic Press version of REMIX is now Creative Commons licensed. You can download the book on the Bloomsbury Academic page."

REMIX now ccFree

An anonymous reader writes "Ever wished your iPhone could do more than just play some cool games? How about using it as a spread spectrum transmitter to fly your R/C Toys around, complete with using a Linksys router as a receiver?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rose sez, "Shatnerquake is a book by Jeff Burk, available now from independent publisher Eraserhead Press who specializes in publishing bizarro cult fiction."

It's the first ShatnerCon with William Shatner as the guest of honor! But after a failed terrorist attack by Campbellians, a crazy terrorist cult that worships Bruce Campbell, all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner.

William Shatner? William Shatner. William Shatner!

Buy Shatnerquake

Ken sez, "Kids on a school trip to Costa Rica made a Diplomacy board out of a pizza box:"

I just got back from chaperoning a high school trip to Costa Rica. While there, some of the kids put together a make-shift Diplomacy game out of a pizza box top. Playing gave the kids and me fun lessons in leadership and negotiation.

Diplomacy is Fun Leadership Training (Thanks, Ken!)

Here's a little Android mobile phone app that turns your handset into a metal-detector, using the compass as a magnetometer. Not super-accurate or sensitive, but possibly useful for grubbing in the beach looking for your car-keys.

Use Your G1 As... A Metal Detector? (via Waxy)

The US Trade Representative is once again trying to pressure Canada into adopting a version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (a 1998 US law that's enabled rightsholders to sue tens of thousands of music fans as well as technology companies, without having any effect on downloading). The strategy is the same as last time, putting Canada on the "Priority Watch List" of countries that are soft on pirates.

Now, you may say that the US has no business telling Canada what sort of copyright laws it should have, and you'd be right.

But as Michael Geist points out, the idea that Canada is a pirate nation is just wrong -- even using the US copyright lobby's own numbers, Canada is a model citizen.

Not only is Canada not even remotely close to any other country on the list, it has the lowest software piracy rate of any of the 46 countries in the entire Special 301 Report. Moreover, it is compliant with its international IP obligations, participates in ACTA, has prosecuted illegal camcording, has the RCMP prioritizing IP matters, has statutory damages provisions, features far more copyright collectives than the U.S., and has a more restrictive fair dealing/fair use provision.

The Absurdity of the USTR's Blame Canada Approach

David Isenberg's posted the text of "Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat," a speech he gave to the Broadband Properties Summit this week, arguing that the most salient characteristic of the Internet is that it allows anyone to deploy any app or service, and that we lost that when we concentrate on making it "broadband" or what-have-you.

This talk is a 30,000-foot view of why our work is important. I'm going to argue that the Internet is the main value creator here - not our ability to digitize everything, not high speed networking, not massive storage - the Internet. With this perspective, maybe you'll you go back to work with a slight attitude adjustment, and maybe one or two concrete things to do.

In the big picture, We're building interconnectedness. We're connecting every person on this planet with every other person. We're creating new ways to share experience. We're building new ways for buyers to find sellers, for manufacturers to find raw materials, for innovators to rub up against new ideas. We're creating a new means to distribute our small planet's limited resources.

Let's take a step back from the ducts and splices and boxes and protocols. Let's go on an armchair voyage in the opposite direction -- to a strange land . . . to right here, right now, but without the Internet.

Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat

The Internet Watch Foundation, keeper of the UK's child-porn blacklist that's used to block access to offending sites (as well as other innocuous ones), has released some new stats saying that it's seen a reduction in the number of child porn sites in the last year. However, sort of like the group's methodology, the figure has quite a few holes. The figure is apparently based on "domains known to the IWF", which is a fairly subjective, and hardly comprehensive, criteria. Also, given the way that the IWF has blocked the likes of Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, how many sites that aren't actually child-porn sites are included in that number? But perhaps more damning is the rest of the report, which highlights just how ineffective the IWF's blacklist really is at tackling the root of the problem. It's well-established that these sorts of filters don't work, despite the IWF implying it can take credit for reducing the number of child porn sites. The IWF says that less than one percent of the sites can be traced to hosts in the UK, and that a huge portion of the commercial sites it's found can be traced back to just ten domain registrars. This illustrates how non-filter solutions, such as working through these registrars to track down child-porn hosts and producers, promise a more effective solution to the real problem -- the production and sharing of the images. Trying to stop consumption via filters really just masks the issue, despite claims that by cutting off demand, the market will shrink. That might work, if the filters actually worked. The IWF does offer some suggestions for more comprehensive solutions to tackle the problem, but as long as it keeps "Public/private partnership involving service providers working through a system of self-regulation" -- basically its current model of getting ISPs to use its blacklist -- at the top of the list, it seems doomed to ineffectiveness.

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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Kevin asks:

What do all those little subscript letters and numbers after V on circuit diagrams mean Vcc, Vee, Vss mean?

I have to admit I didn't really know the full answer to this one, so I looked it up. I found a page on the solarbotics website explaining the whole shebang: Vcc and Vdd means that that point in the circuit is directly connected the power source, and Vee and Vss means that point it connected to ground. It went on to say:

Apparently this terminology originated in some way from the terminals of each type of transistor, and their common connections in logic circuits (i.e., Vcc is often applied to BJT collectors, Vee to BJT emitters, Vdd to FET drains, and Vss to FET sources). This notation then carries across to integrated circuits -- TTL ICs were originally based on BJT technology, and so often use the Vcc / Vee terminology; CMOS ICs are based on FET technology, and so often use the Vdd / Vss terminology.

The absolute distinctions between these common supply terms has since been blurred by the interchangeable application of TTL and CMOS logic families. Most CMOS (74HC / AC, etc.) IC data sheets now use Vcc and Gnd to designate the positive and negative supply pins.

Image is a snippet of the schematic for SparkFun's BlueSMiRF.

Have you got additional information? Post it in the comments! Have a question for Ask MAKE? Shoot me an email at becky@makezine.com or drop us a tweet! We'd love to answer your questions on anything MAKE-y.

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We don't have ads on Scripting News, but from time to time I put in a plug for a product I really like.

A few weeks ago I got a fantastic toaster oven, and I've been looking for food it cooks well. I picked up one of these DiGiorno pizzas and man they are some good food.



It's not Ray's, it's not NY pizza, which is still the best. Yeah it's made by Kraft and it probably is junk food. But it tastes soooo good!

We've seen plenty of government officials get upset about various things critics have said about them, and Tim writes in to let us know that down in Orlando, Florida, the local police chief is threatening to sue a web critic who put up a site highlighting how the chief had her gun stolen from her car, and then that news was kept secret for a while. While there are some complications here (the site the blogger is using is the chief's name, ValDemings.com, for example), it's hard to see how there's any defamation here at all, despite the Chief's claims. She does claim that he portrayed the situation in "false light," but as the article notes, the Florida Supreme Court recently ruled that "false light isn't a legitimate cause of action and has the potential to chill free speech."

But what may be most scary is the following quote from Demings' attorney:

"Truth is not always a defense. I hope he [Harris] gets himself a really good lawyer."

While it's true that some have been trying to push the boundaries of libel law to get rid of "truth" as an absolute defense, that troubles most people, and it's hardly common. Of course, in the meantime, in trying to shut up this blogger, Demings seems to be doing a great job kicking up a lot of attention about the fact she lost her gun...

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An anonymous reader writes "The US is blaming Canada in a new report that claims that Canadian copyright and intellectual property laws are as bad as those found in China and Russia. Michael Geist notes that Canadian officials have dismissed these findings in the past, arguing it 'does not recognize the Special 301 process due to its lacking of reliable and objective analysis.'" (Read more about the annual Special 301 report.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The fine makers over at the Boiler Bar in Oakland, California, are hosting a May Day Party this Saturday, May 2nd, from 8 p.m. "till the flowers wilt." There will be snake charming, cancan girls, fire and may pole dancing, burlesques, lots of live music, handmade hooch from the Boiler Bar, flaming aerial spectacles, and a chance to see the Golden Mean up close and personal.

Pictured above are Jon Sarriugarte and Krysten Mate, makers of the Golden Mean and key members of the Boiler Bar crew. We've featured them in MAKE Volume 16, on the blog, and they've been a presence at every Maker Faire we've hosted. Come see the Boiler Bar extravaganza as well as the Golden Mean gorgeous snail at this year's Maker Faire Bay Area 2009 on May 30th and 31st.

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A few different people have sent in this story about how the developers behind Miro, an open source video watching software, are experimenting with a different sort of business model to support the development of the software: adopt a line of code. It's a cute little gimmick, but it is a creative way to get some attention and give people an additional benefit for supporting the project. They even offer a little widget that you can use to show off the line of code you adopted. I'm not sure how well this will work longterm, since it's more about the gimmick than providing some sort of scarce value, but it's still worth noting.

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Ever get confused about what sort of glue to use on a project? I'm twice degreed in Chemistry, and I certainly do. A great resource is This to That,, a comprehensive "glue advice" database run by a theatrical prop-builder and some buddies. They say:

We aren't a front for any manufacturer or some National Glue Association (if such a thing even exists.) Our recommendations are totally impartial. We have advertisers but they don't influence our selections at all. And they never will. We promise.

The folks at This to That were kind enough to give MAKE permission to reprint their main glue chart in The Maker's Notebook, so it's available in the notebook's reference section in the back.

In the Maker Shed:

Pick up The Maker's Notebook ($19.99) for all your big ideas, diagrams, patterns, etc. Exclusive to the Maker Shed: Sticker sheets and a band closure to customize your book.

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It's still entirely unclear why the entertainment industry so dislikes Canada. There's almost no evidence that "piracy" in Canada is any bigger than anywhere else, but for some reason, every year, the industry goes on a big campaign to get Canada listed alongside countries like China and Russia as places where unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted works thrives. This year, finally, the industry succeeded, and the US Trade Rep has added Canada to its "Priority Watch List" as opposed to just the "Watch List," where it has been the past few years. Michael Geist covers just why this is absolutely ridiculous. Canada already has quite stringent copyright laws, and it has even passed stricter copyright laws over the past few years at the urging of the entertainment industry. It's difficult to see this new announcement as anything other than a condemnation of the US Trade Rep's process for putting together such a list.

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BioMed Central's Nutrition and Metabolism journal published the results of a study at Beiersdorf AG that found that an extract of white tea inhibits the growth of new fat cells and and breaks down the fat in existing fat cells.

After treating lab-cultured human pre-adipocytes with the tea extract, the authors found that fat incorporation during the genesis of new adipocytes was reduced. According to Winnefeld, "The extract solution induced a decrease in the expression of genes associated with the growth of new fat cells, while also prompting existing adipocytes to break down the fat they contain."

White tea -- the solution to the obesity epidemic?

Our friend Bonnie Burton Burton has a terrific new book out called Girls Against Girls: Why We Are Mean to Each Other and How We Can Change. In it, Bonnie explains the "mean girl" syndrome, and why even nice girls sometimes can be mean to other girls. I'm saving it for my daughters.

Written for all teen girls, this insightful book discusses different types of girl-on-girl cruelty, why it happens, and how to deal with it. With details on various forms of abuse common between girls—including betrayal between friends, cyberbullying, hazing, and the silent treatment—this useful guidebook will help teen girls understand why they show aggression to each other, cope with difficult situations, gain confidence, and work together as teams, while also suggesting when to get help from adults when situations get out of hand. It includes quotes and inspirational stories from famous role models who have had firsthand experience with girl meanness, such as Jane Wiedlin, founding member of the Go-Go's; Jenny Conlee, bandmember of The Decemberists; and Tegan, bandmember of Tegan and Sara.

Girls Against Girls: Why We Are Mean to Each Other and How We Can Change

Check out the K450 PVC Rocket Engine Design & Construction book form the Maker Shed. It details how in just a few hours anyone can build a powerful K450 engine that will send a rocket soaring over 5000 feet! Easy to follow step by step instructions and 137 color illustrations demonstrate the exceptionally simple construction process. Best of all, only common materials are used and no special tools are required.

Check out the K450 PVC Rocket Engine Design & Construction book

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