eldavojohn writes "Do you have ancestors who served in the British military under Henry V or fought in the Hundred Years War? Look them up online now that 250,000 medieval battle records are online and available for searching. According to the project details (PDF): 'The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to Flanders, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a much wider geographical spectrum than before 1369. In addition, garrisons were maintained within England (such as that held at the Tower of London), the Channel Islands, Wales and the marches, as well as at Calais and in Gascony. In the fourteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War, the English also held some garrisons in areas of northern France, and in the fifteenth century phase, there was a systematic garrison-based occupation of Normandy and surrounding regions...'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Click on image to enlarge]

Dave Hrynkiw, who runs Solarbotics and HVW Technologies, is our virtual Camp Counselor for "Teach Your Family to Solder" week. One of the things I love about Solarbotics' kits is that they always have excellent, and funny, documentation. Each of these instruction booklets includes the brief soldering tutorial posted above. Really, that's all the basics you need to know. We'll have more detailed tutorials, tips, videos, etc, throughout the week, but armed only with this "quick reference card" and the basic tools, as outlined in my Toolbox column, you'd have what you need to solder successfully. If you're going to be teaching people how to solder, print out the above and have it on-hand for your students.

If you have any questions for him related to soldering, send email to campcounselor@makezine.com.

More:
Toolbox: Soldering essentials, Part 1
MAKEcation: "Teach Your Family to Solder" week
Let's take a Summer MAKEcation!

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It would appear that the typical late-night TV comedian in the US would face serious jailtime in Pakistan, were he based there. MK alerts us that President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan is so annoyed by people passing around jokes about him via SMS that the gov't has started threatening to charge people for passing around such jokes, as "slandering the political leadership of the country" under a vaguely worded Cyber Crimes law, that could lead to 14 years in jail. It seems that should only lead to more jokes. How does one get to be a political leader with such a thin skin?

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An anonymous reader writes "Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers, and even PINs are available to the highest bidder. The information being traded on the Web has been intercepted by a British company and collated into a single database for the first time. The Lucid Intelligence database contains the records of 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans; four million are Britons. Security experts described the database as the largest of its kind in the world. The database is in the hands of Colin Holder, a retired senior Metropolitan police officer who served on the fraud squad. He has collected the information over the past four years. His sources include law enforcement from around the world, such as British police and the FBI, anti-phishing and hacking campaigners, and members of the public. Mr. Holder said he has invested £160,000 in the venture so far. He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So there I am in my studio about to solder up another kit, and all my solder is gone! Who could have used it all up? It's happened before, and this time I'm going to find out exactly who did it. I had a really good idea who it was, but I needed to know for sure, so I broke out my Truth Wrist Band and started my inquisition. As you can see, it worked perfect, no more soldering for this mutt.

Please Note: Don't use the Truth Wrist Band on your dog, it won't work through fur, and they just don't like it. Besides, everyone knows dogs don't lie!

This week's dog days of summer deal is the Truth Wrist Band Kit kit. The kit sells for $44.95, but for the next week, it's only $33, that's 25% off! Only while supplies last.

More about the Truth Wrist Band Kit

The dog days of summer are upon us, and you know what that means? Time to hit the beach? Well, maybe. But, it also means that it's time for some special deals in the Maker Shed. Each week we will feature a kit at a special "dog days" discount. The deal will last about a week, so take advantage of the savings while you can.

Related:

To download The Truth Wristband MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.</a

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jra writes "Once every month or so, people ask here about backups, network management, and so on, but one topic I don't see come up too often is network inventory management — machines, serial numbers, license keys, user assignments, IP addresses, and the like. This level of tracking is starting to get out of hand in my facility as we approach 100 workstations and 40 servers, and I'm looking for something to automate it. I'm using RT (because I'm not a good enough Web coder to replace it, not because I especially like it) and Nagios 3. I've looked at Asset Tracker, but it seems too much like a toolkit for building things to do the job, and I don't want my ticket tracking users to have to be hackers (having to specify a URL for an asset is too hackish for my crew). I'd prefer something standalone, so I don't have to dump RT or Nagios, but if something sufficiently good looking comes by, I'd consider it. I'd like to be able to hack a bit here and there, if I must. Perl and Python, along with C, are the preferred implementation languages; least favorite is Java. Anyone care to share their firsthand experiences with this topic, and what tools they use (or built) to deal with it? "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the effort underway to have Sarkozy's new "three strikes" law approved in France, much of the focus has been on the slightly ridiculous five minute rule it gives to judges reviewing charges of copyright infringement online. An anonymous reader points us to a much more worrisome issue: that the law appears to sneak in provisions that allow for email surveillance by the government. The Senator pushing the law seems to see no problem at all with this, suggesting that it's fine to read through the emails of anyone "stealing intellectual property." Privacy rights apparently mean little to some in France.

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An anonymous reader writes "Many of you may be familiar with Mike Masnick, from the site Techdirt. Beyond just chronicling tech stories for years, he's also been following various music and media industry business models as well. While he's usually among the first (like Slashdot) to express dismay at silly activities from the recording industry, lately he's been cataloging numerous success stories, like business models from Trent Reznor, Amanda Palmer, and Josh Freese. Mike and Techdirt are now taking things a step further, and wondering what would happen if they took the lessons from those success stories and applied it to a media publication: their own Techdirt. The result is 'Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy.' Check out the very special offer for the RIAA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As part of his attempt at manufacturing a toaster from scratch(!), Thomas Thwaites had to figure a way to smelt his own iron (for the grill piece) -

Finding ways to process the raw materials on a domestic scale is also an issue. For example, my first attempt to extract metal involved a chimney pot, some hair-dryers, a leaf blower, and a methodology from the 15th century – this is about the level of technology we can manage when we're acting alone. I failed to get pure enough iron in this way, though if I'd tried a few more times and refined my technique and knowledge of the process I probably would've managed in the end. Instead I found a 2001 patent about industrial smelting of Iron ores using microwave energy.

Microwaves, as we all know, are just so much more convenient - and so I tried to replicate the industrial process outlined in the patent using a domestic microwave. After some not-so-careful experimentation which necessitated another microwave, followed by some careful experimentation, I got the timing and ingredients right and made a blob of iron about as big as a 10p coin.

It'll be very interesting to see how this project turns out - see more of the process & progress on the Toaster Project site. [via Kottke]

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Today on the way to my office in Venice Beach, I saw the following words spray-painted on the wall outside of a local skateboard shop: "RIP, Baby Paul."

Skate/punk/hip-hop photographer Glen E. Friedman last night posted the very sad news about the untimely passing of an early skateboard culture icon: Paul "Baby Paul" Cullen is reported to have died of a heroin overdose this week, though his surviving family have not confirmed cause of death. He leaves behind a child. His brother, Brian Cullen, sends word that those who mourn his death are invited to attend a memorial service at Saint Monica's Catholic Church in Santa Monica, CA, this Saturday at 1030am.

Friedman photographed "Baby Paul" in the 1970s as the young skater ascended to fame. He describes what it was like to see Paul in New York a few summers ago, some 25 years later. He was not well.

He was here for only a few days with his girlfriend and new baby, and he was in sad shape. I felt really bad about seeing him like this, Since I didn't have change I gave him $20 instead of the $10 he asked for. We spent less than 15 minutes talking on a street corner. When I got home, i told my wife that night i'd probably never hear from him ever again. I never did.

He was several years younger than me. He was like a mascot for the original Zephyr team, he was a shredder, the original mini-shredder (before Bella Horvath, before Eric Dressen, before "Mini-Shred"). Photogenic, energetic, and a pure menace to society (I say that in the most admiring way).

We talked off and on over the years, like you do with people you've known for a long time that you do remain in touch with even if it's only rare. Particularly after the DogTown documentary came out but also a lot since i included a photo of him across the title page in The Idealist. I tried to encourage him to make amends with some of those he had trampled over, to clean up, or stay sober, but for someone like me it's never easy.

Read the full blog post, with comments from friends and family, and view more early photos of Paul Cullen by Glen Friedman.

Related thread at surfermag here.

Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Studies, was recently arrested at his own home in Cambridge, Mass. when a neighbor called the cops, presuming him and the also-not-white man he was with to be burglars. Gates described the incident as part of a "racial narrative" playing out in a biased criminal justice system. In this Washington Post article, he explains what happened. Gates was arriving home after a trip to China where he is working on a documentary film, and found the lock to his house had been tampered with. The Moroccan driver who had driven him home from the airport helped him push the door in.

Gates's home is owned by Harvard so he picked up the phone to call the university's real estate maintenance office. Before he could finish the conversation, a police officer was standing on his porch and asking him to come out of the house.

"Instinctively, I knew I was not to step outside," Gates said, describing the officer's tone as threatening. Gates said the policeman, who was in his 30s and several inches taller than him, followed him into his kitchen where Gates retrieved his identification.

"I was thinking, this is ridiculous, but I'm going to show him my ID, and this guy is going to get out of my house," Gates said. "This guy had this whole narrative in his head. Black guy breaking and entering."

After handing the officer both his Harvard and Massachusetts state identification, which included his address, Gates said he began to ask the officer this question, repeatedly. "I said 'Who are you? I want your name and badge number.' I got angry."

According to Gates's account, the officer refused to give it. The police report says, however, that the officer identified himself. "I weigh 150 lbs and I'm 5' 7''. I'm going to give flack to a big white guy with a gun. I might wolf later, but I won't wolf then."

But Gates did keep asking for the officer's name and said he began to feel humiliated when his question was ignored. He then said: "This is what happens to black men in America."

Gates Says He Is Outraged by Arrest at Cambridge Home

Gates is also founder of the Root.com, which is owned by The Washington Post. (via Ned Sublette)

A microtome is a small machine that biologists use to slice specimens into very thin sections to examine under a microscope. Instructables user lemonie made his own out of Lego! In this video demo, the device cuts garlic in slices just 250 microns thick. That's about twice as thick as a human hair. Seems like the Lego Microtome could be scaled up for slicing paper-thin prosciutto! Lego Microtome (Thanks, Christy Canida!)

dusty writes "Plans to bring online the first new US nuclear plant since 1995 are on track, on time, and on budget according to the Tennessee Valley Authority. TVA had one major accident with a coal ash spill of late, and one minor one. The agency has plans and workers in place to have Unit 2 at Watts Bar, near Knoxville, online by 2012. Currently over 1,800 workers are doing construction at the plant. Watts Bar #1 is the only new nuclear reactor added to the grid in the last 25 years. From the article: 'TVA estimates the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor every year will avoid the emission of about 60 million metric tons of greenhouse emissions linked with global warming. ... TVA began construction of Watts Bar in 1973, but work was suspended in 1988 when TVA's growth in power sales declined. After mothballing the unit for 19 years, TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power compared with the existing coal plants or purchased power it may help replace.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don't know if this is real or not, but here is a video of a purported oxytocin party, where people take tablets of oxytocin, the love and trust hormone.

Oxytocin has been in the press quite a bit in the last few years with nicknames like the bonding hormone, the trust hormone and the cuddle drug. Many studies have expanded our knowledge of the effects of oxytocin beyond its most known synthetic form Pitocin, given to induce labor in pregnant women.

Literally translated in Greek to “quick birth,” the neurotransmitter oxytocin (ox-ee-TOE-sin) is naturally released in women’s bodies during childbirth, breastfeeding, nipple stimulation and orgasm. It is found in equal amounts in both men and women but its affects are felt more by women because of their levels of estrogen and prolactin, which increase the effects. Testosterone in men has the opposite effect, in turn negating many of the effects of oxytocin.

Its presence in the body is associated with an increase in recognizing facial cues, bonding, the reduction of anxiety and an overall increase in levels of trust. As part of its anti-anxiety effects, it also helps relax and reduce blood pressure and cortisol levels. In men’s, oxytocin may facilitate healthy erections and sperm ejaculation.

Oxytocin Party (Via Dose Nation)

Marc Campbell of The Nails made a video of his song "88 Lines About 44 Women."

In the 30 years since 88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN was first recorded there has never been a video version authorized by THE NAILS. Of the dozens of videos on youtube that pay homage to the song, this is the only version created by a member of the band, me. So, here’s the world premier of 88 LINES the video. Hope you enjoy it. I had fun making it.

It was worth the wait!

The video is NSFW in a 1950s National Geographic sort of way.

(Via Dangerous Minds)

Videogum.com Senior Editor Gabriel Delahaye says,

You know that kid who posted a video on-line about a month ago of his brother having a freakout because their mom suspended his World of Warcraft account? Well, that was a pretty good freakout, sure, but since then the two of them have posted four more freakouts. FAKE. And if you're going to post a fake freakout, then the freakout should really be a lot better. These guys have not stepped their game up. And I think the title of World's Greatest Freakout is being used a little loosely by them. They are teenagers just trying to have fun, sure, but they should be more careful. With words.

That is why we are hosting the World's Greatest Freakout Contest.

Let's beat that kid at his own game. Winner gets a microwave.

Here's a fascinating post on the IDSA Materials and Processes blog about the things you can learn about injection moulding from studying the "ejection marks" on the surface of plastic objects:

So I noticed the marks on the lid of my mother-in-law's trash can and thought about what that says about how this part was made and how this might be something an industrial designer would need to understand. What I was looking at was the ejection mark placed on an angled surface. Because this large HDPE (high-density polyethylene) part will be somewhat soft when it is ejected or pushed out of the mold, the molder needed to be able to bear on several points close to the perimeter of the part (because just pushing on the middle would probably permanently distort the warm part).

Further inspection of this part also showed that the gates (injection points for the part) was on the underside, or opposite side of the part, which told me that the part probably rode back with the moving half of the mold and then was ejected after the side action (see the lip used to lift the lid?) retracted.

What's That?: Ejection Mark On Angled Surface (via Beyond the Beyond)

Robert Pearlman of collectspace.com says, "Forty years to the day after it was found and collected by Neil Armstrong, a moon rock is helping NASA mark the anniversary of the first lunar landing from on-board a perch that is closer than any Apollo-returned lunar sample has ever come to its original home."

Full story on Robert's blog here. Image above: The Apollo 11 moon rock, seen here before its launch, is now on the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA/collectSPACE).

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Bryan "linux-works" Levin built this Arduino compatible LCD backpack -

all the wiring needed to connect the LCD, the IR input module, power, lcd contrast, pwm-based dimming and a 6pin FTDI style usb serial header for upload of new firmware.

the IR module is in silver (left) and was a very old radio shack module.

the 6 pin header is via the wire harness; it was hard to solder the 6 pin header 'in reverse' on this kind of single sided board and this board is not very strong (the header could lift off the board with enough unpluggings). so my solution was to use the wire, itself, as a strain-relief.

this cable also is an easy way to give the circuit power (5vdc).

More project pics available in his Flickr photostream.

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Folks, don't forget (or maybe you were unaware): we have an events calendar here on the site where you can submit your own happenings. We get tons of event submissions each week, for Dorkbots, Make: City events, hackerspace workshops, TechShop classes, geek festivals, science fairs, and the like -- all awesome and worthy activities. We can only post a fraction of these on Make: Online, but you can enter them ALL into the calendar on the Maker Events page.

If you're looking for events in your area, check the current calendar under our Forum/Community tab.

Maker Events Calendar
Forum/Community Area

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Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

(Poster's note: in reading the comments, I realized I probably wasn't clear with my criticisms here. I do certainly understand that ads are not to be taken literally, and advertising hasn't been about the actual qualities of the product for decades. We talk about that in the book, even. I was more taken by this particular approach itself, and how I found the conceit itself inane. That said, most of the comments that advertising is not about the product is right on the money, and that right there is a good thing to keep in mind.) Since our book is about advertising, let's talk about some ads. Some awful ads.

If you could find someone totally unaware of what a Twix bar was (friendly alien, unfrozen pilgrim, etc.) and showed them these current crop of Twix ads, and then asked them what Twix bars were, I bet you'd get an answer like "Twix bars? Aren't they those crunch-activated time-stopping rods?"



And that assessment would be totally justified, based on these ads. They're relying on the tenuous idea that we're all not drooling idiots to take this literally, because the only qualities of a Twix bar demonstrated in these commercials are the ability of the Twix bar to stop time. There's nothing mentioned of the taste, the crunch, the dubious energy benefit-- all the usual candy bar selling points-- just the bold suggestion that these crunchy little logs have colossal power over the time-space continuum. I know no one really thinks they can do that, and this is just an advertising conceit, but it's strange when the big marketing appeal of your product is the freedom it gives you to be a jackass.

Before we get anything further, I should make it very clear that they can't stop time. I've said some truly awful, offensive things to people, and when I've tried to use a Twix bar in the demonstrated manner, I've just come off looking even more like an idiot, but this time an idiot with a dripping mouthful of half-masticated candy and a panicked, confused look in his eye.

Now, even beyond the strange misrepresentation of a candy bar as a long wished-for tool of profound power, there's one other really awful thing about these commercials: everything else. The Twix ad agency has managed to concoct that perfect cocktail of unfunny, misogynistic, and confusing all at the same time. In the ad above, what girl is going to be that swept off her feet by some jackass with a popped collar smarmily chiding his idiot man-child friend?

And this one, if possible, may even be worse:



It sounds like it was written by someone's 55 year old uncle who overheard about blogging from his niece when she was talking to a friend on that little Game Boy or whatever it is she's always fiddling with. Sure, maybe it's tongue-in-cheek, and they're aware how insipid it all sounds, but it's just not funny enough to really sell me on that. It has the same improbably stupid women, the same valueless, douchebag guys, the same deus ex candybar qualities for the product.

The real shame here is that Twix bars are really pretty good-- ever scrape away all the chocolate and caramel with your teeth, leaving that pale, perforated shortbread girder? It's fun. And, to the adfolks' credit, I do like the use of the two Twix bars as a pause icon. But, beyond that, Twix admen, "take a moment" for all of us and insert these two Twix bars in your anuses.

tlhIngan writes "Physical intimidation of a Foxconn employee, 25 year-old Sun Danyong, and a possibly-illegal search of his house may have led to suicide after an iPhone prototype in his possession was lost. Foxconn is Apple's long-time manufacturing partner for the iPhone. Entrusted with 16 iPhone prototypes, Danyong discovered that one was missing and searched the factory for it. When it didn't turn up, he reported the incident to his boss, who ordered his apartment searched. There are reports of physical intimidation by Foxconn security personnel. This ended tragically on Thursday at 3 AM, when Danyong jumped from his apartment building to his death." VentureBeat notes that "Apple exerts immense pressure on its business partners [to] help it maintain secrecy." An Apple spokesperson said this to CNet: "We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing points us to something that I'm seriously hoping is a joke (please, please, please, someone tell me this is a joke/parody/Photoshop/etc.) -- involving Madison Square Park in NYC, which is supposedly now being managed by HSBC -- and thus (again, I'm hoping this is a joke) the lawyers have decided to put up giant end user license agreements (EULAs) that you supposedly agree to by entering the park:
[Photo: Rod Townsend] Assuming this does turn out to be fake (please!), what's scary is how unsurprising it would be -- and how many people seem to immediately assume that it is, in fact, true. We're so used to such EULAs in every day life, that seeing something like this just wouldn't strike all that many people as being obviously fake.

Now, if this is actually real, then, things are even worse. It's difficult to believe (by any stretch of the imagination) that such a thing is even remotely legally enforceable. Already there are questions about the legality of "clickthrough" EULAs, and one would have to imagine that the enforceability of a "walkby" EULA is even more in doubt. So, whether or not this is true, fake or a joke... it's a rather depressing sign (literally) of the times.

Update: In the comments, Shawn points out that this is likely associated with HSBC's "Soapbox" ad campaign, which only makes it marginally less ridiculous (but no more enforceable).

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Wanted to record this to be sure I get back to it some point.

Problem is with all HTTP requests emanating from tcp.httpClient.

Setting the timeout has no effect when its not possible to open a connection on the server because tcp.openStream doesn't take a timeout parameter. It's always 20 seconds, near as I can tell.

Once I get back into the C source again I'll have to check this out.

You can see the problem on the log page for rssCloud -- when testing the link back from a remote app registering a handler, the timeout is never less than 20 seconds, even when it's unreachable. I have the timeout param in tcp.httpClient set at 180 ticks (3 seconds), which is plenty to find out if there's anyone at the other end.

ericatcw writes "'NoSQL' alternatives such as Hadoop and MapReduce may be uber-cheap and scalable, but they remain slower and clumsier to use than relational databases, say some. Now, researchers at Yale University have created a database-Hadoop hybrid that they say offers the best of both worlds: fast performance and the ability to scale out near-indefinitely. HadoopDB was built using PostGreSQL, though MySQL has also successfully been swapped in, according to Yale computer science professor Daniel Abadi, whose students built this prototype."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member siimvahur built this anamorphic pinhole camera in aluminum enclosure - plus posted a nice collection of build pics here.

More:

Homemade anamorphic camera

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YouTube user Oosker posted vids of these hyperactive little vibrobots he made from pagers motor, watch batteries, and bits of tin.

Drunken Robot Cocktail Party [via adafruit]

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Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

You don't see too many Johnny 5/El Debarge paintings around, right? I made one a while back I thought you might like to see-- it incorporates some LED scrolling text, which I think has been absent from painting for far too long.

0. I know about View Source.

1. I use Firefox.

2. When I view my site's RSS feed I want to see the XML, not a stylesheet rendering of the XML.

3. To be clear, I want to see the actual XML.

4. Is there some way to force the browser to do this?

5. Please no lectures on how this isn't the way it's supposed to work. TIA.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Doctor's groups, including the AMA and too many others to list, are supporting the Mayo Clinic in the case Prometheus v. Mayo. The Mayo Clinic alleges that the patents in question merely recite a natural phenomenon: the simple fact that the level of metabolites of a drug in a person's body can tell you how a patient is responding to that drug. The particular metabolites in this case are those of thiopurine drugs and the tests are covered by Prometheus Lab's 6,355,623 and 6,680,302 patents. But these aren't the only 'observational' patents in medicine — they're part of a trend where patents are sought to cover any test using the fact that gene XYZ is an indicator for some disease, or that certain chemicals in a blood sample indicate something about a patient's condition. There are even allegations that certain labs have gone so far as to send blood samples to a university lab, order testing for patented indicators, then sue that university for infringement. Naturally, Prometheus Labs sees this whole story differently, arguing that the Mayo Clinic will profit from treating patients with knowledge patented by them. They have their own supporters, too, such as the American Intellectual Property Law Association." Promethius doesn't seem to be a classic patent troll; they actually perform the tests for which they have obtained patents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard sez, "A woman was handcuffed, detained and threatened with arrest for filming officers on her mobile phone - who abused the abysmal UK terrorism laws."

Atkinson's mobile phone recorded part of the incident at Aldgate East underground station on 25 March, one month after Section 58(a) - a controversial amendment to the Terrorism Act - came into force, making it illegal to photograph a police officer if the images are considered "likely to be useful" to a terrorist...

The opening part of the mobile phone clip shows two uniformed police officers searching her boyfriend, Fred Grace, 28, by a wall in the station. Atkinson said she felt that police had unfairly targeted Grace, who did not have drugs in his possession, and decided to film the officers in order to hold them to account.

Seconds later, an undercover officer wearing jeans and a black jacket enters the shot, and asks Atkinson: "Do you realise it is an offence under the Terrorism Act to film police officers?" He then adds: "Can you show me what you you just filmed?"

Atkinson stopped filming and placed her phone in her pocket. According to her account of the incident, which was submitted to the Independent Police Complaints Commission that night, the officer tried several times to forcefully grab the phone from her pocket.

Failing to get the phone, he called over two female undercover officers from nearby. Atkinson said he told the women: "This young lady had been filming me and the other officers and it's against the law. Her phone is in her right jacket pocket and I'm trying to get it..."

A second female officer approached her and said, incorrectly: "Look, your boyfriend's just been arrested for drugs, so I suggest you do as we say."

Atkinson claims the male undercover officer who initially approached her repeatedly threatened her with arrest, stating: "We believe you filmed us and that's against the law so we need to check your phone." When Atkinson protested, the officer replied: "I don't want to see myself all over the internet."

After officers made calls to the police station, possibly for legal advice on the situation, the handcuffs were removed and Atkinson was released.

She said the officers walked away - all but one of them refused to identify themselves to her. </blockquote Woman 'detained' for filming police search launches high court challenge (Thanks, Richard!)

Previously:

• London cops declare war on photography - Boing Boing
• UK mall bans grandparents for trying to photo their grandkids ...
• London cops mug tourist for his bus-station photos - Boing Boing
• UK Police seize amateur photographer's film - Boing Boing
• UK cop: 'War on terror means no pictures of police vans in ...
• Londoners: rally today at Scotland Yard 11AM to preserve the right ...

One of the regular discussions we get into around here is over the question of whether or not things like copyright and patents are really property. The IP lawyers who insist that it's just like property focus on a rather simplistic (and wholly inaccurate) explanation of why it is property: which is that if it's a bundle of rights that can be transferred, then it is property. But that's misleading. Because it mixes up a couple of key elements that make this definition quite inconvenient. The key among them is that those who hold IP rights rarely sell them (yes, it does happen, but it's a rare transaction when it does). Instead, they mostly license the rights. And that's rare with real property. Again, it does happen sometimes, but not very frequently -- and, when it does, it's always represented quite clearly as a rental or a lease rather than a purchase. It's not even thought of in the same framework. So, you have a major difference right there.

And, in fact, there's a reasonable argument that when most of the transactions are licenses but are represented as purchases, it's actually very much against the basic principles of property, rather than for them. Martin points us to a fascinating and thoughtful writeup, by Nicklas Lundblad, originally written in Swedish, but the Google translation is quite readable, that discusses how the recent actions by Amazon to delete purchased George Orwell ebooks on the Kindle demonstrates just how anti-property "licensing" is (my own edit of part of the translation):

What is interesting with the time, however, is that it illustrates an example of a conflict that has not been seen very often - between the copyright and ownership of individual copies of a work which we have purchased legally. As noted in the article above, we would probably flinch [if someone] knocked on the door, courteously explained that the publisher who sold us the last part of Harry Potter no longer wants to provide a paper edition, and that therefore they had brought with him a little gasoline to burn up our copy . Most of us would probably shut the door again, put on a little coffee and [laugh]... [if anyone] would try their hand at this. But in the transition to the digital economy it will make it harder for us to protect our own space and our property, as more and more terminals are now sold [with what is] charmingly called a "kill switch". The iPhone will have, like the Kindle and other terminals: an opportunity to, at a distance, without our consent in the case (but we have certainly agreed to it in any agreement anywhere) change the content of the technologies we use.

And that very fact is incredibly anti-property. The idea that something we believe we have legitimately purchased can suddenly be snatched away from us, at a distance, with no recourse is not property. It's the opposite of property. In the comments to our original post, someone pointed out that for all the copyright maximalists who like to refer to infringement as "theft," Amazon's deletion of 1984 was a lot closer to "theft" in that people who had purchased something suddenly found that it was gone. Poof. That is extremely anti-property, and anti-free market -- and that's a problem:

The original article goes on to note that while a contractual agreement is the cornerstone of the free market, a license agreement built on copyright is quite different. It's built with a very strong imbalance, backed up by government protectionism, that changes the free market structure. Lundblad notes:

The license is like a parody of a contract because the contract coordinating effect been eliminated from the outset by a law which gives one party all the bargaining power.

While I have no doubt that this will upset and anger the folks who believe that copyright is absolutely 100% property, it's a rather compelling explanation of how copyright isn't just not like property, but in many ways is anti-property in that it violates some of the basic tenets of true property and true property rights.

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Chemist Eric Stroud is the proprietor of SharkDefense, a company that develops new shark repellents. His aim is to protect sharks from people, keeping them away from trawling nets and fishing lines. Apparently, approximately 12 million sharks are accidentally ensnared each year. Some of Stroud's experimental repellents are extracted dead sharks themselves. The odor, which smells like stinky feet, is quite abhorrent to the sharks. From Smithsonian:

Magnets made from iron, boron and neodymium are another promising repellent being developed by SharkDefense. Eric Stroud discovered their repellent potential by accident. According to Stroud, he and colleague Michael Hermann were playing with magnets near a research tank containing lemon and nurse sharks. After spotting a broken pump, Stroud set a magnet down on the tank’s side, and the sharks took off. He thinks that the magnets may overload the sharks’ Ampullae of Lorenzini. These tiny pits found along a shark's head are used to detect faint electrical signals emitted by prey, in the same way a doctor uses an EKG to detect the electricity generated by your pumping heart. The magnets are unlikely to cause pain, says Richard Brill, a SharkDefense collaborator at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. He and others hypothesize that it’s equivalent to a bright flash of light. You wince because it’s overloading the visual receptors in your eyes. “It’s the same idea with the sharks, except it’s overloading these electrical receptors, “ Brill says. Stroud has been using stationary magnets so far, but he also sees potential in spinning magnets, which generate a greater magnetic field.

Stroud and his team are also working with electropositive metals, which produce a current when placed in seawater and also possibly affect sharks’ electromagnetic sense organs. Scientists are testing the metal repellents as a solution for the dogfish bycatch problem. Researchers found that the metals, when attached to fishing lines, reduced shark bycatch by 17 percent in Alaskan fisheries. But when the experiment was repeated in the Gulf of Maine, the results were negligible. “We think the dogfish are just going after two different preys,” says Stroud, who is completing a Ph.D. in chemistry at Seton Hall University. Rice speculates that the metals may not affect Northeast dogfish because the sharks are using smell more than their Ampullae of Lorenzini to detect prey.

"Stopping Sharks by Blasting Their Senses"

Ross Harris says: "My daughter and I made a video / song using only balloons and helium."

Terrific. I wanted it to be longer.

Colonel Korn writes "Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain suggests in an Op-Ed piece that the seemingly inevitable move toward the often locked-down cloud is stifling innovation and threatening our privacy: '... many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple. If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents. We've only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That's not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's another photo of the mutant pig with the "monkey face" that I posted about last year. From the London Paper:

The bizarre animal also has rear legs which are much longer than its forelegs, causing it to jump like a kangaroo instead of walk.

At the time, locals flocked to the home of Feng Changlin when news of the piglet spread in Fengzhang village.

"It's hideous. No one will be willing to buy it, and it scares the family to even look at it!" Feng said.

"Pig born with the face of a monkey" (via Fortean Times)

Make: television host John Edgar Park made a "mystery box" for his friend. The inspiration for this object (which contains something of interest that the recipient is supposed to never see) came from J.J. Abram's TED Talk about the mystery magic trick box from Lou Tannen Magic Store that he's own since childhood but has never opened.

Here's what the fellow who received the box had to say about it:

On the top of the box is a question mark and the bottom is the Greek letter Phi. The box even had a theme: One of the faces carries a picture of 16th-Century German mathematician Michael Maestlin, who was the first scientist to write about the Golden Ratio. Another face sports a golden spiral, which is another way of expressing that constant, yet another shows an image from Leonardo DaVinci's Divine Proportion applying the Golden Ratio to the human form. The panels of the box even conform to the ratio, being 3 inches wide by 4.85 inches high. Crazy nerdy.

More esoterically, moving the box caused an intriguing rattle to sound from inside. Perfect. So what's next? I'm just going leave the box on my desk and admire its mysteriousness.

I'm admiring the mysterious of it, too!

Building a mystery box

A buddy of mine from high school planted this "chia keyboard" as a workplace prank. Says Warren,

This took me two tries to get it right. I had to build a moisture trap with toothpicks and Saran wrap to get the seeds to germinate.

Here's an older and more detailed how-to by Johannes Hjorth.

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eldavojohn writes "Got a piece of malfunctioning brain tissue in your head? Want to avoid messy lobotomies and skull saws? Well, you're in luck; a study shows that acoustic waves can do the trick and will hopefully treat patients with disorders like Parkinson's disease. A specialist said, 'The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain — through the intact skull and skin — with extreme precision and accuracy and safety.' They focus beams on the part of the brain needing treatment and it absorbs the energy, which turns to heat. The temperature hits about 130 F, and they can burn 10 cubic millimeters at a time. Using an MRI to see areas of heat, they can watch the whole time and target only what needs to be burned. The study consisted of nine subjects suffering from chronic pain that did not subside with medication (normally they need to go in and destroy a small part of the thalamus on these patients). After the outpatient procedure, all nine reported immediate pain relief and none experienced neurological problems or other side effects after surgery."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Make: Online, Phil Torrone provides a step-by-step for reading 1984 on your Kindle without fear of having Amazon sneak onto your device and zap it down the memory hole while you sleep.

Once you arrive in Australia stop by this site and download a copy of 1984. Read the warning first:

Under Australian copyright laws, copyright in literary works of authors, who died before 1955, has expired. These works are now within the 'public domain' in Australia and this is why the University is able to reproduce such works on this site. HOWEVER, works may remain copyrighted in other countries. If copyright in the work still subsists in the country from which you are accessing this website, it will be illegal for you to download the work. It is your responsibility to check the applicable copyright laws in your country. In particular, the works of George Orwell are still under copyright in the United States and the European Union, and therefore users in those countries should not download these works.

Don't worry - you're in Australia, they're totally chill down under.

How-To: Read George Orwell's 1984 on your Kindle

In October 1994, at the dawn of blogging, I wrote a piece that actually shook the software world. At the time, the idea of a mere software developer expressing an opinion in public, unedited, in his own words, without the help of a major publication, was unheard of. It had never happened.

The piece was called Bill Gates vs the Internet. The thought was pretty simple. The tech industry was mired and exhausted. Too many BigCo's struggling to be the one who controls the future. As if a company could control the future. But the headlines in the business press encouraged them to think this way. Much as the leading tech blogs encourage Schmidt, Zuckerberg and Williams today to think of themselves as masters of the universe. They aren't and it's a losing strategy today as it was 15 years ago.

The problem for Bill Gates in 1994, the newly crowned King of Tech, was the Platform Without a Platform Vendor, the Internet. The difference between the Internet platform and the Microsoft platform was this: No Microsoft. No one to hold on to the family jewels. No one to put a developer out of business if they personally offended Bill. No one to keep the personalities of developers under control. No one to cut off their air supply.

In 1994, there was a revolution brewing. Bill didn't believe. But it happened anyway, even though he struggled mightily against it.

Blogging is one of the things that came out of this revolution, and along with it archives. So I can point to a piece I wrote in 1998 and it's still there. It was systematized, in software. This idea didn't come from a BigCo, and it didn't get killed by one. The free Internet solves problems pretty well. BigCo's don't solve problems.

So now instead of Bill Gates it's Evan Williams.

I read the piece on TechCrunch and thought it sounds like the transcripts of conversations from Microsoft in the mid-90s. Both were trying to compete with the Internet. Ev's problem is how is he going to keep his key engineers from defecting to the competition. How are they going to let developers use the "firehose" without using it to kill TwitterCorp. These are problems the Internet doesn't have. It doesn't employ any engineers, and when they leave one company to work for another they still work for the Internet. On the Internet no company owns all the data, so no one can control it. If you don't like the way a service works, use another.

The tech industry keeps having this argument with the Internet. It keeps thinking "this time we gotcha" but nahh, the Internet keeps right on going.

Moral of the story: If you find yourself in competition with the Internet, you should find a way out. Imho.

Irwin Chusid has just published a new Jim Flora print. Only 25 copies were produced. (That horsey creature gives it a bit of a Guernica vibe.)

Jim Flora Art has released a limited edition fine art print of a 1960 tempera titled BIG EVENING. The hyperactive tableau depicts a cavalcade of misshapen, multi-eyed mutants with bonus body parts. People just like you!

New Jim Flora print: Big Evening (1960)

A few years back, we had an interesting discussion around the idea that many students might not view using modern technology to share answers as "cheating" so much as they would view it as wikipedia-like collaboration. I thought this was an interesting observation, since I'd never really thought of it that way. Someone who ought to remain anonymous alerts me to a discussion of a recent study on student "cheating" on exams via mobile phones and similar technology, which found, not only that lots of kids do it, but that they don't think it's wrong. In the comments to that post, there's a fascinating comment by Ryan Scott that again highlights the point about collaboration:

The premise of memorization is the problem here. What's far more important than memorizing some formulas is knowing where to find them and how to apply them.

In NO industry is collaboration considered cheating. Only in SCHOOL is this a problem. What are we teaching our kids?

I'm an employer. I want my employees reaching out and building networks of people that can help them. I struggle with this whole 'that's cheating' attitude. It's something I need to UNTEACH my employees. It does NOT matter to me if you know how to do something, it matters to me that you can figure out how to do it. Most businesses, especially information based, need employees who know how to find and apply information, not that have a repository of facts in their heads. We are creating everything new -- NO ONE knows how to do the things many companies deal with on a daily basis unless you are a clerk of some kind. We are figuring it all out on the fly. Building alliances, search skills, knowing where and how to find information -- all these are what's valuable.

The argument that school, memorization, and solitary work teaches you how to think is absolutely wrong. If we really want to teach people how to think, we should have a class called How To Think, not Ancient Greek History. You don't teach thinking skills by forcing 30 people to memorize the same names, dates, and events. You do it by teaching principles, and by teaching directly the actual skills the education system claims to want to create.

We need more 'How to Think', 'How to Collaborate', 'How to Negotiate', 'How to Resolve Conflict' and less 'Memorize a bunch of stuff for a test'

Plagiarism is an exception. Passing off someone else's work as your own is clearly wrong. But forcing kids to memorize facts and not giving them what's truly important -- that is to say thinking skills is the big problem here.

Thinking about plagiarism some more. I'm always telling my employees to research before writing -- cobble together a collection of other people's work and give me an opinion. Build on whats already out there, don't start from scratch.

Well said. Again, I don't think that "cheating" is the problem here. The problem is this focus on not teaching people how to work together to solve problems and assuming that everything needs to be done by the individual themselves. That's not how things work in the real world, and it does children a disservice to downplay collaboration and reinforce the idea that building off the works of others is somehow wrong. Standing on the shoulders of giants is important, or we're always reinventing the wheel.

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The upcoming issue of The Comics Journal has a fantastic story about the greatest comics anthology that never was.

Issue #299 of The Comics Journal (in-stores August 2009, premiering at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con) unearths a long-lost treasure: Way back in 1970, satirist/editor Michel Choquette conceived a mammoth anthology of new comics from all over the world by just about every cartoonist imaginable circa 1970 (as well as such unimaginable cultural icons as Federico Fellini and Frank Zappa). All of the contributors were to riff on the 1960s, creating a comics snapshot of that decade, but the project kept growing in ambition until it reached a scale that scared off its publishers. Today, bookstore shelves are filled with comics collections and graphic novels, but in 1970, there was no Watchmen or Persepolis. Even Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus had yet to be published. To publishers of the time, Choquette’s dream book was an enormous folly and one by one they backed out of negotiations, leaving Choquette, who had spent all his book advances traveling the globe enlisting contributors, to disappear into relative obscurity.

But by the time publishers had gotten cold feet, Choquette had already assembled an astounding array of comics contributions from 190 of the most influential comics creators and cultural figures of the 1960s and ’70s, including: Jack Kirby, William Burroughs, Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Arnold Roth, Don Martin, Michael O’Donoghue, Ralph Steadman, Tom Wolfe, Wally Wood, Bill Griffith, Barry Windsor-Smith, Gahan Wilson, Moebius, C.C. Beck, Vaughn Bodé, Harlan Ellison, Shary Flenniken, Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny, Russ Heath, Doug Kenney, Patrice Leconte, Chris Miller, Denny O’Neil, Roy Thomas, as well as the aforementioned Fellini and Zappa. It was a legendary compilation of the comic art form that would give heart palpitations to anyone who ever loved comics or was alive in 1970, but no one has seen it all except for Choquette.

Comics Journal writer Bob Levin tracked Choquette down and discovered that this long-lost El Dorado of comics still exists in storage. In an epic article, Levin follows Choquette’s path across continents and countries as the would-be anthologizer encounters a cultural Who’s Who of the ’60s and ’70s (Salvador Dali! Gloria Steinem! Jann Wenner! Jorge Luis Borges! Bianca Jagger!), collecting art that will, in part, see print FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER in the pages of this issue.

The Comics Journal #299 [Pre-Order]

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports on new software called 'Vanish,' developed by computer scientists at the University of Washington, which makes sensitive electronic messages 'self destruct' after a certain period of time. The researchers say they have struck upon a unique approach that relies on 'shattering' an encryption key that is held by neither party in an e-mail exchange, but is widely scattered across a peer-to-peer file sharing system. 'Our goal was really to come up with a system where, through a property of nature, the message, or the data, disappears,' says Amit Levy, who helped create Vanish. It has been released as a free, open-source tool that works with Firefox. To use Vanish, both the sender and the recipient must have installed the tool. The sender then highlights any sensitive text entered into the browser and presses the 'Vanish' button. The tool encrypts the information with a key unknown even to the sender. That text can be read, for a limited time only, when the recipient highlights the text and presses the 'Vanish' button to unscramble it. After eight hours, the message will be impossible to unscramble and will remain gibberish forever. Tadayoshi Kohno says Vanish makes it possible to control the 'lifetime' of any type of data stored in the cloud, including information on Facebook, Google documents or blogs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

That inner emptiness you've been feeling lately is probably due to the fact that you don't own one of these.

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Photo Credit: Shweeb

Each week we're bringing you some of our favorite posts from our friends over at TreeHugger. Enjoy!

Rappers Say Get Outta Your Cars!
Anti-car-idling rappers flow about green issues in this quick street film.

Shark Attack Victims Head to Capitol Hill
"We've been finned...and it's not a good thing." A group of shark attack victims are sympathetic towards the ultimate predators, and head to DC to lobby Congress for tighter protections for sharks.

Wind-Powered Tank Uses No Fuel, Confuses Infidels
They had the right idea back in 1335 with this tank that looks like a windmill. Now that is something for Don Quixote to joust!

Get in a Tube and Pedal Across Town
A pedal-powered monorail idea makes you feel a little bit like you're in one of those air tubes at the bank that gets sucked up into the ceiling. But it could end up being the public transportation of the future.

Science fiction scholar and critic Farah Mendlesohn's latest book, The Intergalactic Playground: Children and Science Fiction is a keen-eyed, affectionate, insightful and cranky look at science fiction novels aimed at kids. Mendlesohn starts with some of the earliest kids-lit, from the thirties, and surveys all they way up to the present day, looking at how changes in work, adolescence and science education have changed the sort of work that gets published for young people.

In particular, Mendlesohn looks into the way that "extreme sport readers" -- kids who devour books at the rate of one or two a day -- have dropped out of the modern conception of how kids read (and how many of today's adult science fiction fans were that kind of reader in their childhoods). She also takes issue with the idea that books have to sneak up on kids in order to teach them things -- that kids never read fiction with the explicit goal of finding out how and why the world works -- an idea that has hammered a stake through the didactic traditions of science fiction.

Intergalactic Playground combines reader surveys, extensive literature review, and a distillation of the fights waged on kids-literature mailing lists, synthesizing them into a deep, intelligent, and engrossing read.

Intergalactic Playground

Here's my T-shirt for Woot. Only $10 and shipping is free! (Price skyrockets to $15 after 24 hours).

My 11-year-old daughter Sarina gave me the drawing of Bun Bun and I traced it in Illustrator and submitted it as "my" T-shirt design. I suppose I'll have to give her a share of the royalties.

(Here's Ape Lad's shirt. He is the curator / editor of all the shirts on Woot this week.)

Bun Bun shirt by Mark (and Sarina)

Recently on Offworld, One More Go columnist Margaret Robertson reflects on why Final Fantasy XII is a game she can't help but return to, for its ability to let you "get closer to the ultimate goal of being a perpetual killing machine, a super-efficient, zero-emission, friction-free engine of domination" -- a loop of "preparing, witnessing and fixing" that's "one of the most compelling I've encountered in games." Elsewhere we listened to (on repeat, all day) Pterodactyl Squad's 8-bit Weezer cover compilation, which is already being heralded as one of the best chiptune introduction and gateway collections ever assembled, and watched the first video of the iPhone's retro-future shooter Space Invaders Infinity Gene. We also saw 10 more minutes of Cymon's ASCII Portal, every bit as mind-warping as the last, found new images of Björn Hurri's pixel-catburglar that we even moreso hope ends up a game, saw IGF winning backward-shooting rhythm game Retro/Grade coming to the PS3 with Rock Band guitar support, and dug further into one of the artists behind Uniqlo and Namco's awesomely designed Pac-Man 30th anniversary T-shirts. Finally, our 'one shot's: the original Legend of Zelda goes first person, falling in love with the majesty of colors from the cthulu-an perspective, pen-marker-magic sketches of BioShock, and gorgeously quick-sketched views from the world of Shadow of the Colossus.

adeelarshad82 writes "It's probable that the 802.11n standard will finally be approved at a scheduled IEEE meeting this September, ending a contentious round of infighting that has delayed the standard for years. For the 802.11n standard, progress has been agonizingly slow, dating back almost five years to 2004, when 802.11g held sway. It struggled throughout 2005 and 2006, when members supposedly settled on the TGnSync standard, then formed the Enhanced Wireless Consortium in 2006 to speed the process along. A draft version of 802.11n was approved in January 2006, prompting the first wave of routers based on the so-called draft-n standard shortly thereafter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I recently was lucky enough to find a Nintendo Virtual Boy on Craigslist for $20-- it's a fascinating failure of a system, with LEDs and spinning mirrors, and the resulting images do look surprisingly 3D, like puppet show made of red cellophane.

But, more importantly, one of the games, Teleroboxer, has what I think is the most brutal game over screen I've ever seen (and sorry for the image quality-- I'm shooting this through one of the eyepieces): Jesus, Rick. Worthless and weak? Come on, man. That hurts. That really hurts.

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

The makers of Jamba Juice have ripped off David Rees' Get Your War On in a new ad campaign. To his credit, Ree's has taken the assault like a man, organizing a National Day of Prayer to "pray our way across America, destroying Jumby Juice franchises left and right..."

Still, he has some words for the ad's creators:

Whoever made this ad is probably a 22 year-old "creative" at some ad agency in Tech Valley, CA. Way to think outside the box, sonny. Have fun snorting cocaine at the nightclub you go to with your friends who work at Twitter or wherever. And no, Adult Swim will NOT buy your stupid cartoon you're developing with your housemates about four guys who work at an ad agency but are secretly lobsters.

Summer is a great time to kick back with a frosty cold one, especially one you made yourself. Check out Instructables' collection of beer tutorials, from home brewing to homemade openers.

More:

• Blackberry pale ale
• Ask MAKE: Siphon for homebrewing beer
  
• How-To: Custom beer bottles
  
• How-To: Knap an arrowhead from a beer bottle
  

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Today I discovered -- joy of joys -- a new, sweet indie bookstore near my office, Clerkenwell Tales, in London's Exmouth Market (02077138135). The stock is still filling in, but as a former bookseller and confirmed bookstore junkie, I was delighted by what I saw.

Case in point: Julius Perdana and Josh Buczynski's Build Your Own Paper Robots, a handsome hardback volume with an included CDROM featuring printable designs for 14 kick-ass articulated papercraft robots. Also included are scalable, layer-separated line-art versions of the bots, so that you can render them bigger or smaller, and color them to your own taste, assembling printable robot armies with your printer, some card-stock and glue.

Clerkenwell Tales had a few copies left after I snagged one (and plenty more to like besides), but if you're not anywhere near London, there's also some copies available at Amazon UK.

Build Your Own Paper Robots

Paper-Replika's review

CNETNate writes "Complete with Street View-like panoramas, 3D models of spacecraft now left abandoned on the moon's surface, and guided tours from the voices of Apollo astronauts, Google's recent update to Google Earth marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with an enormous update. It's a collaboration with NASA and other agencies, and follows the launch of Google Earth 5.0 which, amongst other things, added the ability to explore our planet's oceans. There are a number of original creations — such as the 3D mock-up of the Apollo 11 spacecraft and its astronauts — and you can download the new version from Google now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "They may drag their feet on things like the three-and-a-half-year-old Amazon 1-Click Patent Reexam, but the USPTO can put on their fast-shoes when they want to. For evidence of the agency's sense of urgency, just look at how quickly they put together an Exhibit of Michael Jackson's Patent and Trademarks. If you can't make it out to the USPTO Museum (and store) by Labor Day, you can check out Michael's expired-due-to-nonpayment-of-fees patent for a Method and Means for Creating Anti-Gravity Illusion online, and also see it in action in the video for Smooth Criminal (@7:16). BTW, Jackson's co-inventors also designed Michael's suit for his L.A. funeral."

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On the forums at Crazy Builders, a maker named "Technician" has posted a series of videos and photos explaining how his quick dump valve high-speed marshmallow cannon works. The cannon is made from some PVC pipe, a propane camping lantern bottle, and some 1" pipe. It's a scaled-down version of a larger T-shirt cannon he built for a competition.

Marshmallow Cannon

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Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

I collect books by people who have raised apes in their homes. One of the first, The Ape and the Child, was written in by behaviorist W.N. Kellogg, a man with a peculiar brainstorm: that he should raise a chimpanzee as a twin to his own infant son, treating them in exactly the same fashion, and comparing their development. Kellogg was fascinated by case studies of feral children: if kids raised by wolves become wolf-like, he hypothesized, could a human such as he mold an ape to act human?

Kellogg made four films of his studies and 1 of those films is now online.

Results? Mixed. The chimp, Gua, took more quickly to her civilizing education than her brother. She appeared smarter, stronger, and more emotionally developed on a number of counts: she was better at using glasses and silverware, walked earlier (chimps generally don't walk upright), responded to verbal commands sooner, and was more cooperative and obedient.

What we don't learn from Kellogg's study, however, is that chimps' "domestication" peaks around age 2, when humans' surpass them. And the reason we don't learn that is because Kellogg discontinued his study when his charges were around 2. Kellogg explained that he had accomplished his goal: he proved that environment matters. After all, you don't see a lot of chimps eating cereal from a spoon in the wild.

But Kellogg's claim was a bit disingenuous. The fact that environment shapes animal development was already well understood. The real reason he abruptly halted the study, then, was likely because of results that Kellogg never anticipated: his son Donald started imitating the chimp.

For example, though Donald had learned to walk before Gua joined the Kellogg family, he regressed and started crawling more, in tune with Gua. He'd bite people, fetch small objects with his mouth, and chewed up a shoe. More importantly, his language skills were delayed. At 19 months, Donald's vocabulary consisted of three words. Instead of talking he would grunt and make chimp sounds.

Gua got sent back to the Yerkes center in Florida, where she promptly died. And Donald? Not much is known of his life, but, at 43, he committed suicide.

This study got a lot of press when it was published, but Kellogg ended up deeply regreting it — not because of what it did to his son, but because it prevented him from being taken seriously as a scientist.

Variations on this study were conducted repeatedly through the 20th century. There were a number of cases of people attempting to raise chimps in their homes as humans, and perhaps I'll write more about those later. But, to the best of my knowledge, no one ever used a human infant as a guinea pig again.

Sources:

The Ape and the Child by W. N. Kellogg and L.A. Kellogg, New York: Whittlesay House, McGraw-Hill, 1933

The Ape and the Child (W.N. Kellogg page at FSU)

Comparative Tests on Human and a Chimpanzee... (1932) (Archive.org)

I previously gave a talk on this as part of my Brooklyn-based lecture series, Adult Ed.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A judge rules that IP addresses are not 'personally identifiable information' (PII) because they identify computers, not people. That's absurd, but in truth there is no standard definition of PII in the industry anyway, because you don't need one in order to write secure software. Here's a definition of 'PII' that the judge could have adopted instead, to reach the same conclusion by less specious reasoning." Hit the link below to read the rest of his thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maker Sebastian Dwornik needed a way to mount a mobile device to his mountain bike to field test some software he'd written. If you've ever tried this, you know what a pain it is to try to strap something small on to your handlebars, not to mention things can get pretty banged up while you're out-and-about. His solution, though crude, turned out to be quite effective.

The secret comes in the form of a brilliant product called Model Magic. Originally designed for young children to express their creative talents through modeling with it. The material is safe, clean, cheap, and air-dries within 24 hours to a firm and rubbery substance that holds the shape it was molded in.

It makes for an excellent shock absorber as well as a perfect fit for any device you sculpt it for. You can even paint it any colour afterward, but I just left it stock white for simplicity.

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kfogel writes "Canonical has just fully open-sourced the code to Launchpad. Although we'd said earlier that a couple of components would be held back, we changed our mind. All the code has been released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. 'Canonical will continue to run the Launchpad servers, taking care of production and deployment issues; opening up the code doesn't mean burdening the users with all of that stuff. At the same time, we'll institute processes to shepherd community-contributed code into the system, so that people who have ideas for how to improve Launchpad can quickly turn these ideas into reality.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few months back, I wrote about attending an absolutely fascinating one-day conference all about the 1909 Copyright Act, which hasn't been the law of the land in about 33 years. And, yet, one thing became clear throughout the session: there was plenty in that law that made a lot more sense than what we have today. There were a few "old timers" who complained about the way it was before 1976, but their complaints were a lot more about the specific implementations (and, at times, oddly, a massive desire to keep content out of the public domain, which they found to be a fault of the 1909 Act). Law professor James Boyle has been looking over the legislative history that resulted in the 1909 Act and notes that we seemed to be a lot smarter about copyright law back then. Among the points raised: the recording industry was actually the one defending new technologies against being covered by copyright, noting that the innovation itself (in this case, the player piano) didn't actually take away anything from artists, but helped promote the goods that they sold (in this case, sheet music). But, what struck Boyle most was that unlike today, the legislators writing the law seemed to actually understand the real pros and cons of extending copyright, and didn't get sucked into misleading arguments about how copyright was "property." Even more amazing, legislators didn't automatically think that "more" copyright was a good thing -- but that it had potentially some benefits and some downsides. These days, of course, politicians have been taught that copyright is a universal good, and they rarely seem willing to recognize the potential downsides (or, even worse, the actual evidence of downsides) to extending copyright so far.

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Colombian junkbot builder Mario Caicedo Langer made the "PROCTOR SILEX: DEFENDER OF THE KITCHEN" robot out of broken kitchen appliances, noting "when you grow up watching 'Transformers', 'Short Circuit', 'Batteries not included', 'Mazinger Z", 'Festival de los Robots', 'Bots Master', and every TV show and movie with robots, you finish thinking robot!"

PROCTOR SILEX: DEFENDER OF THE KITCHEN (via Make)

ekran writes "A while ago Opera Software needed more servers. Not just a few servers either — they were planning Opera Mini's growth, implementing Opera Link, and My Opera was also growing quickly. Most of the major hardware vendors grabbed their specs and came back with offers and sample servers shipped all the way to Oslo for testing. One of the biggest vendors, however, did not do their homework. They shipped the server, but when the Opera sysadmins started up the web-admin interface, they were met with a JavaScript statement that managed to piss off the whole company including the CTO. The script, apparently, locked out the Opera web-browser."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love all of the fun, inspiring work being done in robotic found-art sculpture. Bot sculpture, built out of junk, is one of the folk art forms of the early 21st century. One of the mad practitioners of the form is Mario Caicedo Langer, of Bogotá, Colombia. Check out his Flickr photostream for other awesome bot art made from kitchen appliances, computer parts, joysticks, and other household detritus.

Proctor Silex: Defender of the Kitchen

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LinuxScribe tips a piece up at Linux.com with inside details on the design and construction of the Apollo 11 code. There are some analogies to open source development but they are slim. MIT drafted the code — to run on the Apollo Guidance Computer, a device with less grunt than an IBM XT — it had 2K of memory and a 1-MHz clock speed. It was an amazing machine for its time. NASA engineers tested, polished, simulated, and refined the code. "The software was programmed on IBM punch cards. They had 80-columns and were 'assembled' to instruction binary on mainframes... and it took hours. ... During the mission, most of the software code couldn't be changed because it was hard-coded into the hardware, like ROM today... But during pre-launch design simulations, problems that came up in the code could sometimes be finessed by... computer engineers using a small amount of erasable memory that was available for the programs. The software used a low-level assembly language and was controlled using pairs or segments of numbers entered into a square-shaped, numeric-only keyboard called a Display and Keyboard Unit... The two-digit codes stood for 'nouns' or 'verbs,' and were used to enter commands or data, such as spacecraft docking angles or time spans for operations." Reader Smark adds, "The Google Code Blog announced today that the Virtual AGC and AGS project has transcribed the Command Module and Lunar Excursion Module code used during the Apollo 11 moon landing. The code is viewable at the VirtualAGC Google Code Page."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jim Seller's made this amazing box full of gorgeously-machined art-widgets as a gift for a friend. It doesn't actually do anything, except make people feel really good looking at the craftsmanship and love involved. Jim wanted to make something in the style of a 19th century scientific instrument. He calls it the ETD (Earth Tremor Detector).

I want to know how you get to be a friend of Jim Sellers. Hopefully this post on MAKE is a start.

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Well, this wasn't difficult to predict at all. As noted last week, a company named Zookz clearly stretched and misinterpreted the WTO rulings in the dispute between Antigua and the US. Given the sheer number of emails their high-end PR people have been dumping my way, the fact that they were making a mockery of the ruling was part of the plan to get them press attention. Of course, they might not have expected the Antiguan gov't to quickly step up and point out that it didn't support Zookz either. So the latest is that Zookz has shut down the site and promised to return money to anyone who subscribed. They claim that they'll be back, but I wouldn't count on it. At least not in any form similar to what they originally advertised.

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The Baltimore public transit system is trying to get the legal go-ahead to use microphones to record the conversations of passengers and drivers on the buses and trains. Shocking, huh? Watch how fast this becomes everyday -- just like CCTV. After all, if we can simply ignore the all-seeing, all-spying eye, why not the all-listening ear?

Update:: Thanks to Jackie31337 in the comments for pointing out that the MTA withdrew the proposal, "Maryland Transportation Administration Acting Secretary Beverly Swaim-Staley said Monday evening that she has withdrawn the following request to the attorney general for a legal opinion, saying the matter should have been reviewed at the department level before the MTA sought legal advice." I translate this as meaning, "We didn't know that sunshine laws meant that floating this kind of insane balloon within government meant that the public would find out how totally, completely, creepily nuts we are, whoops!"

The MTA is considering installing audio surveillance equipment on its buses and trains to record conversations of passengers and employees, according to a letter sent by the MTA's top official to the state Attorney General's Office...

"As part of MTA's ongoing efforts to deter criminal activity and mitigate other dangerous situations on board its vehicles, Agency management has considered adding audio recording equipment to the video recording technology now in use throughout its fleet," Wiedefeld wrote.

MTA thinking of listening in (Thanks, Patrick!)

Here's an "admittedly mad" Instructables project from XenonJohn: how to hack a portable 8-track tape walkman in the style of the original Sony cassette Walkman.

This is an admittedly mad project to see what might have happened if Sony had invented the Walkman earlier than they did - and made it so it took 8 track tape cartridges (which came before cassette tapes were invented).

In other words, can I make a personal 8 track player with just headphones in the style of a Walkman? How small can I make it? Bear in mind it needs quite a bit of power to move the tape loop around inside the cartridge.

8 Track Walkman-Pod thing (Retro-tech) (Thanks, Michael Chabon!)

Modern games are extremely expensive to make. High-profile, AAA titles have budgets in the tens of millions, and even the smaller, independent titles can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Couple this with development times that frequently reach three or four years and you have publishers who are very shy about investing in new projects, particularly for unproven IPs. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell recently spoke about a new way of funding such games: "There's a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative. What I think would be much better would be if the community could finance the games. In other words, 'Hey, I really like this idea you have. I'll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I'll also get a copy of that game.'" Such a system would certainly relieve some of the pressure to stick with tried-and-true concepts (and possibly get management to grant a little more leeway with deadlines and resources), and it would make the video game industry more of a meritocracy than it already is.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Modern games are extremely expensive to make. High-profile, AAA titles have budgets in the tens of millions, and even the smaller, independent titles can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Couple this with development times that frequently reach three or four years and you have publishers who are very shy about investing in new projects, particularly for unproven IPs. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell recently spoke about a new way of funding such games: "There's a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative. What I think would be much better would be if the community could finance the games. In other words, 'Hey, I really like this idea you have. I'll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I'll also get a copy of that game.'" Such a system would certainly relieve some of the pressure to stick with tried-and-true concepts (and possibly get management to grant a little more leeway with deadlines and resources), and it would make the video game industry more of a meritocracy than it already is.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is an interesting musical interface called the PianoDuino. It uses the SoundCipher library for Processing and an Arduino to create interactive sound. Check out the web site for a little more information, and all the code needed to build your own.

PianoDuino is a simple experiment that integrates Arduino, Processing and a library to manipulate sounds, the SoundCipher. The idea was to try the Multiplexer / demultiplex 4051.

More about PianoDuino [untranslated]

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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John sez, "The town of Tiburon, California (pop. 9,000) has a scheme to photograph and record the license plate number of every single vehicle that enters the municipality, in order to 'fight crime.' But don't worry: 'As long as you don't arrive in a stolen vehicle or go on a crime spree while you're here, your anonymity will be preserved,' said Town Manager Peggy Curran." h

Melissa Ngo, a privacy rights attorney and consultant who publishes privacylives.com, said she is not aware of a situation where a town is keeping a record of all visitors.

"The point is we live in a land where people are considered innocent until proven guilty," Ngo said. "Not a land where it's supposed to be -- prove that you're not doing anything wrong by letting us watch you do everything."

Curled on the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Marin County, Tiburon is not a high-crime spot. In 2008, police report there were 99 thefts, 20 burglaries and two auto thefts.

Town on SF Bay wants to photograph every car (Thanks, John!)

Merlin sez,

The Panopticon is the oldest music hall in the world (to the knowledge of the Britannia Panopticon Music Hall Trust). It was home to the early careers of many music hall legends such as Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame. The hall fell into disuse and disrepair after it closed in 1938 with the rise of the film industry and has since been reopened. A trust (aforementioned) has been established to renovate it and repair the insides The hall still needs donations to help foot the bill for renovations and as such the trust has opened it up for shows. It has been doing shows for some time now and is now reasonably successful.

One of the upcoming shows [ed: on Aug 8] is a presentation/fare being arranged largely by the members of the Glasgow University Steampunk Society (G.U.E.S.S), who have managed to arrange food, stalls, acts (music, magic and maybe even juggling), a lecture on stage magic, the potential for the uses of a vintage magic lantern. The stalls will present steapunk mods, items of a steamy nature, jewellery, clothing and other things and trinkets. There will be a chance for visitors to join the Steampunk society/ their mailing list and amusement will be provided by the acts and the friendly and amiable members of G.U.E.S.S. The Britannia Panopticon is a piece of history. Please help us help it and create Victoriany goodness in Glasgow.

GUESS presents "Glasgow By Gaslight" - Aug 8th - Maker Fair and Show (Thanks, Merlin!)

John sez, "As a UK resident I am getting increasingly pissed off with the amount of cameras aimed at me. I live and work in central London and cameras are everywhere. I was amazed to see from this map of the UK showing number of CCTV cameras per 1000 that London did not beat all. This place is crazy."

The borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of CCTV cameras in London, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras - 1,113 - is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and Dublin City Council combined.

The statistics of CCTV (Thanks, John!)

Biomedical engineering students at Johns Hopkins have shown how to make sutures containing the patient's own adult stem cells to promote quicker healing:

"Using sutures that carry stems cells to the injury site would not change the way surgeons repair the injury," said Matt Rubashkin, the student team leader, "but we believe the stem cells will significantly speed up and improve the healing process. And because the stem cells will come from the patient, there should be no rejection problems."

Students Embed Stem Cells in Sutures to Enhance Healing (via Medgadget)

An anonymous reader writes "I have just moved overseas on a 2-year working holiday visa and so I picked up a netbook for the interim, an MSI Wind U100 Plus running WinXP. I love it to bits. But as I am travelling around I am somewhat worried about theft. Most of my important stuff is in Gmail and Google Docs; however, I don't always have Net access and find it useful to gear up the offline versions for both. Ideally I would like to securely delete all the offline data from the hard drive if it were stolen. Since it is backed up in the cloud, and the netbook is so cheap I don't really care about recovery, a solution that bricks it would be fine — and indeed would give me a warm glow knowing a prospective thief would have wasted their time. But it's not good if they can extract the HD and get at the data some other way. All thief-foiling suggestions are welcome be they software, hardware, or other."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

The New York Times today published a previously unreleased body of research conducted by the Department of Transportation in 2003 on the safety effects of using cellphones and other wireless communications devices while driving.

The New York Times obtained the research from the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen, two consumer advocacy groups that earlier this year acquired more than 250 pages of undisclosed material through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Here is the takeaway: talking on a mobile, or worse yet, inputting text or fiddling around with an app -- all are forms of distraction while driving. The less distracted you are while driving, the safer you and everyone else on the road with you will be. Duh.

Documents: Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

Related article: DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION: U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving (Matt Richtel, NYT)

Previously on Boing Boing:
Radley Balko on NY Times photo: " I can't really conceive of a scenario where it wasn't staged."

I've been getting into some interesting discussions with people lately concerning open vs. closed platforms -- especially in light of the supposed "success" of Apple's iPhone app store, which is a very closed platform. And the point that I've tried to make is that you have to understand the trajectories of these things over time. At any given time, it's never difficult to find a closed platform that is successful. In fact, I'd argue that if you are reshaping a market, often it helps to have a closed platform initially to drive that market in a useful direction -- though, this can really only be accomplished by someone visionary (Steve Jobs certainly counts). The question is how does this play out long term. And the answer is that you can't stay closed too long, or open solutions will catch up and surpass you. We've seen this pattern multiples times (closed AOL --> open internet?).

Where this gets trickier is that the open solutions are almost always substandard to the closed solutions initially. In some ways, this is by design. The closed solution is often much cleaner and slicker, and so it gets a lot of the initial use. But, overtime, the limitations of the closed solutions become increasingly clear, and as people bump up against those limits, frustrations increase, and more and more effort is put towards making the open solutions better -- even to the point that eventually they exceed the closed solution. It's a messy process, but the point where momentum shifts is often a subtle one, and the proprietors of the closed solution usually don't recognize it's a problem until way too late.

I believe that's the case with the App Store. The iPhone itself did an amazing job pushing the state of the mobile phone/portable computer market forward. There are some people who like to mock it as nothing special, but that's unfair. The device itself was a huge leap forward in demonstrating what a phone could be, and many others are just starting to grasp what this means more than two years after the original was introduced. That said, we're seeing more and more evidence concerning frustrations on the limits imposed by Apple's closed system, such as the arbitrary rejections of apps.

James points us to a worthwhile post from an iPhone developer, noting how the process is getting to the point where it's less and less worth it to develop for that platform. You have to put in a ton of work, and then you have to wait for quite a while just to get the app approved (or rejected), and the whole process is quite arbitrary. With that in mind, developers have a lot less certainty, and it shows a growing interest in other platforms.

To date, admittedly, such alternatives really haven't been very good. There are other app stores (some more open than others), but none has really been able to build up much traction yet on other devices. But there's a huge opportunity here if someone else can make this happen (or, if there were a way to standardize across some of the competitors) and start doing a better job serving both developers and consumers. The closed solution helps define the initial market -- but the open solution almost always wins in the long run.

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Cartermarquis writes:

The Snorricam, named after Einar Snorri and Eiour Snorri,or the "Snorri Brothers", is a body mount for a camera which is used to create an interesting point of view, which can be seen in such movies as I Am Legend, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Hangover. I work for a small video production company, and with much enthusiasm from my boss, I designed and built my own version of the Snorricam, which is very adjustable and versatile. For about $30 in parts, and around a day of labor, You can have yourself an adjustable Snorricam of your own!

As a woman, I can see room for improvement in the chest plate design, but otherwise this looks really cool!

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The artist (Sander Mulder) made 20 limited edition of these clocks and 1 artist proof...

On this Continue Time clock, two out of the three pointers rotate around another pointer, instead of the central point on the clock face, as with traditional clocks. The resulting kinetic artwork, and functional clock, is continuously changing its shape during a full rotation of twelve hours. While creating mesmerizing patterns on your wall the pointers are still read as with any traditional clock. The Continue Time clock measures 105 centimeters from end to end; a full 12 hours will span a circle of 210 centimeters centimeters of wall.

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An anonymous reader recommends an Ars Technica account of a breakthrough in efforts toward quantum computing. German scientists have managed to get cesium atoms in a state called a "quantum walk": basically a superposition of all the possible states of particle. "Quantum walks were first proposed by physicist Richard Feynman and are, in terms of probability, the opposite of a random walk. A random walk might be modeled by a person flipping a coin, and for each flip he steps left for heads and right for tails. In this case, his most probable location is the center, with the probability distribution tapering off in either direction. A quantum walk involves the use of internal states and superpositions, and results in the hypothetical person 'exploring' every possible position simultaneously." In the abstract of the paper from Science (subscription needed for full-text access), the researchers say: "Our system allows the observation of the quantum-to-classical transition and paves the way for applications, such as quantum cellular automata."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And... here we go again. A company named Tsera LLC, a Texas company that has no products or online presence, and which certainly appears to be a typical patent hoarding shell company has now sued a bunch of companies in East Texas (of course) for patent infringement. Of particular interest are the claims against Apple and Microsoft. The patent in question, 6,639,584 is for some sort of touch interface, and the lawsuit claims that the iPod and the Zune both use touchpads that infringe on the claims in the patent. Of course, the patent itself seems to cover some slightly different things, as the article notes the system doesn't have visual feedback and users don't need to view the device. That's not quite the way portable music devices work... Once again, this appears to be a blatant money grab by some folks who had nothing to do with the actual advancement in this space.

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MAKE subscriber Chris Brent sent us word of this release of the source code for the Apollo 11 command module and lunar lander software, which can be run on yaAGC (an open source emulator of the Apollo Guidance Computer).

From the Google Code Blog:

On this day 40 years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon. This was quite an achievement for mankind and a key milestone in world history.

To commemorate this event the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC (an open source AGC emulator) by the Virtual AGC and AGS project.

For more information on this project, I recommend looking at the website and the open source project.

Here's a cute video of the AGC emulator compiled to run on a Palm Centro.

Apollo 11 mission's 40th Anniversary: One large step for open source code...

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By now you've probably seen the NY Times's long piece on distracted driving — about how most drivers and most legislators willfully ignore the evidence of the dangers of talking on a cellphone, texting, and other electronic distractions while behind the wheel. According to this article, cellphone use while driving causes over 1,000 fatalities a year in the US. Another shoe has now dropped: it seems that the US National Highway Safety Administration blocked a proposed definitive study of the risks. The NHSA now cites concerns about angering Congress. Two consumer safety groups had filed a FOIA request for documents about the aborted study, and the Times has now made the documents public — including the research behind the request for a study of 10,000 drivers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I'm still all hopped-up on moonwalk sauce today, so I thought it would be worthwhile to take a moment to consider the other end of the Space Race-- the Soviets. After all, without a competitor, it's not really a race, now is it?

At the beginning of the 1960s, a betting man would have likely put his cash down on a hammer and sickle getting planted into the lunar regolith before Old Glory. It makes sense-- the Soviets had a hell of a space program, which, by certain metrics (endurance, space station systems) can still be considered the best in the world.

But they didn't get to the moon. They came close-- closer than most people realize-- and for years they denied they were even trying. They were close to scooping the US's Apollo 8 trans-lunar flight (they did get some turtles to fly around the moon), they had a massive moon rocket, a one-man lander, and an impressive mother ship-- but they didn't have the money, time, or, really, leadership to get it all together.

In the end, they had too many technical problems with the N-1 moon rocket (it had many engines that had to all work together-- a technical nightmare), and just not enough money or time to fix it. They did eventually get lunar samples returned robotically, and sent some delightfully jalopy-like lunar rovers to the moon. These rovers were long suspected to have had human (midget or child) drivers, so, who knows, maybe they did get some comrades up there after all.

Anyway, as we happily remember Buzz and Neil, spare a thought for our lovable loser pals. Things would have been lots more exciting if they made it up there, too, and I bet we'd still be there now if there was a Moskvaluna next door to Moon-Newark.

Here's a sample from David Wolman's list of the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs:

7. Human stomach. People can digest a lot — except for cellulose, the primary component of plant matter. Why don't we have commensal bacteria in our guts to do it? They're busy helping termites.

8. Slug genitalia. Some hermaphroditic species breed by wrapping their sex organs around each other. If one of said members gets stuck, the slug simply chews it off. What. The. Hell?

9. Quadrupeds. Let's say you're a four-footed animal. Now let's say you get a wound on your back, or an itch, or a bug wandering up there. Tough luck, kid. You probably can't do much about it. Hope there's a low branch around.

10 Worst Evolutionary Designs

Here's an opinion piece that caught my eye, suggesting that the interconnected world and things like Twitter mean that predictive modeling tools for things like retail sales may be in trouble. Effectively, the argument can be summed up as: information flows faster than your algorithm. I'm not sure it's really necessarily true, but it's certainly worth thinking about. Specifically, he's suggesting that as much as you can try to model "expected behavior" you simply cannot predict or measure sudden flash-fads, which are more common and more impactful with the speed of information these days.

The example he uses is where Michelle Obama recently wore a J. Crew outfit, driving sales of that outfit through the roof. No predictive model could expect that. In some ways, this actually reminds me of another recent story as well. Comedian David Chappelle was apparently in Portland and told a couple people he was planning to show up at a certain city square to do an impromptu midnight outdoor show with a tiny amp and microphone he had just purchased. But in the course of about seven hours, the news spread rapidly via Twitter and Facebook. Chappelle had expected perhaps 200 people, and estimates in the end put the number at many thousands of people (the small amp apparently couldn't amplify his voice enough, and the large crowd became such a concern that he basically sent everyone home after a few attempts to get a bigger amp). While it didn't involve an algorithmic predictive model, this case involved Chappelle's human predictive model that over the course of a few hours you could maybe expect 200 people who would (a) find out about it (b) be nearby and (c) be willing and able to come out at midnight. But the ease of communication changed that equation and made it a lot more difficult to predict the outcome.

Now, of course, the issue with both of these are that they may be outliers. Most other clothing at J. Crew probably followed a typical predictive sales path. And a less famous comedian would probably struggle to get anywhere near 200 people to show up. So, I'd say I'm not at all convinced (as the article posits) that Twitter "confounds" predictive modeling. I think it still requires other random events to occur -- and those have always happened in the past. Perhaps the interconnected nature of the world today can massively amplify a sudden flash fad, but that doesn't necessarily mean you toss predictive modeling out the window. Considering it was such an odd claim to use a few random outliers to damn an entire useful tool, it seemed worth digging a bit deeper... and (surprise!) it turns out that the guy who wrote the article runs a company selling a tool that competes with predictive modeling software focusing on "behavioral analytics." So, his argument is basically a strawman against predictive modeling that uses some outlier data without any evidence of a real trend. I'm certainly interested in the ability of social media to amplify a fad, but I don't think it has a really serious impact on most predictive modeling.

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