Friday, November 19, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

TSA confiscates heavily-armed soldiers' nail-clippers

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 04:51 AM PST

Here's an anonymous account of a US Army soldier returning from Afghanistan who watched as his buddies -- who were all carrying high-powered rifles, pistols, etc -- were forced to surrender their nail-clippers and multi-tools:
So we're in line, going through one at a time. One of our Soldiers had his Gerber multi-tool. TSA confiscated it. Kind of ridiculous, but it gets better. A few minutes later, a guy empties his pockets and has a pair of nail clippers. Nail clippers. TSA informs the Soldier that they're going to confiscate his nail clippers. The conversation went something like this:

TSA Guy: You can't take those on the plane.

Soldier: What? I've had them since we left country.

TSA Guy: You're not suppose to have them.

Soldier: Why?

TSA Guy: They can be used as a weapon.

Soldier: [touches butt stock of the rifle] But this actually is a weapon. And I'm allowed to take it on.

TSA Guy: Yeah but you can't use it to take over the plane. You don't have bullets.

Soldier: And I can take over the plane with nail clippers?

TSA Guy: [awkward silence]

Me: Dude, just give him your damn nail clippers so we can get the f**k out of here. I'll buy you a new set.

Soldier: [hands nail clippers to TSA guy, makes it through security]

This might be a good time to remind everyone that approximately 233 people re-boarded that plane with assault rifles, pistols, and machine guns-but nothing that could have been used as a weapon.

Another TSA Outrage

Chris McKitterick pirates his own book

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 04:38 AM PST

Science fiction writer Chris McKitterick's experiences with pirate editions of his latest novel are a good, complex and nuanced story about the plusses and minuses of giving your work away.

Chinese woman kidnapped to labor camp on her wedding day over sarcastic re-Tweet

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 02:43 AM PST

In an effort to prove that there are authorities even stupider than those in the UK when it comes to parsing Twitter, the Chinese government has sentenced a woman to a year in a labor camp for retweeting a message about young demonstrators who'd patriotically trashed Japanese products during a dispute over claims to some empty islands in the East China Sea. Cheng Jianping was kidnapped and sent off for forced labor on the day of her wedding, and her family didn't discover where she was for nearly a month:
Her fiance Hua Chunhui made a satirical comment mocking youth demonstrators who smashed Japanese products in protest over a dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.

"Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan [an activist and expert on the Nanjing Massacre]. It's no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you'd immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion," Hua wrote.

Cheng retweeted the message and added "Charge, angry youth!" in a message, which has since disappeared from the micro-blogging site.

Hua has not been arrested. The BBC reports that Cheng has been sent to Shibali River women's labor camp in Zhengzhou city in Henan province.

Chinese Twitter sentence: a year in a labor camp for a retweet (via /.)
 


RuneScape devs refuse to cave in to patent trolls

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 02:36 AM PST

Jagex, the UK game dev behind RuneScape, refused to be intimidated by patent trolls Paltalk, who claim a broad patent on what amounts to all online multiplayer gaming. Microsoft settled a similar bogus claim last year, giving Paltalk a war-chest and a precedent with which to continue with nuisance suits against other MMO companies, including Sony, Blizzard, Activision, and others.

Jagex spent "tens of millions of dollars" in cash and time defending itself against the claim, but eventually prevailed. I'm reasonably certain they could have settled for less, since Paltalk's protection racket depends on a string of easy settlements for credibility and cash, but by talking a stand, Jagex has helped to break the cycle by which a company whose main product these days is lawsuits is able to extract millions from firms that are actually making things that people want.

The ruling favors Jagex, but for company CEO Mark Gerhard, the damage is already done. "It is exceedingly unfortunate that the U.S. legal system can force a company with a sole presence in Cambridge, UK to incur a seven-digit expense and waste over a year of management time on a case with absolutely no merit," he said in a statement.

"This anomaly, which could easily break smaller studios, doesn't happen in the UK since you can pursue frivolous litigants for the costs of such claims," he added. "We are particularly disappointed that Paltalk did not, at any stage prior to filing the lawsuit, seek to contact us to clarify that Jagex's game platform did not infringe Paltalk's patents."

While a settlement may have have been less costly than drawn-out litigation, Gerhard said that Jagex "will not hesitate to vigorously defend our position against any patent trolls who bring lawsuits against us in the future." Reps for Paltalk did not immediately return request for comment.

UK-Based RuneScape Dev Jagex Wins Patent Infringement Lawsuit (via /.)

Similarities between genetic and textual mutations

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 02:27 AM PST

Samuel Arbesman from the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science has a fascinating look at the parallels between the way that text mutates over the years (say, because sloppy scholars copy a misquote, rather than referring to the original text -- something I admit to doing myself) and the way that genes change due to conceptually similar transcription errors. And just as mutations provide clues in unravelling the histories of species, so too can textual drift teach us about the histories of our ideas.
It's clear what a mutation is in genetics: a strand of DNA gets hit by a cosmic ray, or copied incorrectly, and some error gets introduced into the sequence. For example, an 'A' gets turned into a 'G', although they can be much larger in effect. These errors can range from causing no problem whatsoever (don't worry - the majority are like this), to causing large-scale issues due to the change in a single letter of DNA, such as in the case of sickle-cell anemia.

Well, there are also systematic errors in copying a text. Whether it's skipping a word or duplicating it, there is order to the ways in which a scribe's mind wanders during his transcription. Many of the errors can be grouped into categories of error, just like the different types of genetic mutations. And not only are there regularities to how both DNA and ancient manuscripts are copied, but it gets even better: despite the differences in terms, these types of errors are often identical.

For example, there is a scribal error known by the Greek term homeoteleuton. This refers to a type of deletion, where there are two similarly ending passages and the scribe skips to the second ending without transcribing the first intervening portion. For example, if a section read, "And you should do the following things because I am the Lord. Here's what you should do, because I am the Lord. Amen." and it was instead copied as "And you should do the following things because I am the Lord. Amen." that would be a homeoteleuton.

Mutated Manuscripts: The Evolution of Genes and Texts (via Kottke)

(Image: Rodent Mutation, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from x-ray_delta_one's photostream)

 


Understanding the "microcredit crisis" in Andhra Pradesh

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 02:17 AM PST

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon has scorching media-criticism over the coverage of the "debt-strike" in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where the governor has urged citizens to stop paying some of the microcredit lenders that operate in the region. The Western press accounts have painted this as a question of poor people rebelling against trendy-but-usurious lending institutions, but Salmon suggests that the real motivation behind the governor's anti-microfinance campaign: he is behind a competing, state-run microcredit venture that stands to benefit from defaults against other firms.
In fact, I'm beginning to think that this is one of those stories which is better reported from your neighborhood coffee shop with wifi than it is from Andhra Pradesh itself. There's nobility in sending reporters halfway around the world to get the story at first hand, and the NYT does provide the compulsory human-interest color by ending the story with a 38-year-old farmer who owes $2,000 and has no ability to repay it. But the paper breaks no news with this story, and seems so keen to re-report everything by talking to the principals involved that it's forgotten the first purpose of stories such as these, which is to explain the world clearly to the readers back home.

The irony here is that by flying across the planet for the story, the NYT has missed the big global picture, which is that Andhra Pradesh is simply the latest and largest proof that microfinance as an industry is at the mercy of regulators and politicians, who are more likely to get things wrong than they are to get things right. Remember Nicaragua? It doesn't take much in the way of political demagoguery to persuade a population to stop paying its loans en masse, driving the local lenders into immediate bankruptcy. Similar things have happened in Bolivia, Bosnia, Pakistan, and Morocco, but the microfinance true believers are often oblivious to this kind of political risk. Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidyar has put some $200 million of his own money into microfinance, for instance, but when I met him in New York recently and asked him about this risk to the model, he had no idea what I was talking about.

The lessons of Andhra Pradesh (via Making Light)

(Image: Hand in Hand traditional sari weaving family enterprise, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mckaysavage's photostream)  

Clever octopus tentacles stuffed with neurons

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 02:10 AM PST

Here's a sketch of some of the current research into the distributed intelligence of octopuses, which appears to be spread out among the neuron-dense tissues of the tentacles:

Octopuses have large nervous systems, centered around relatively large brains. But more than half of their 500 million neurons are found in the arms themselves, Godfrey-Smith said. This raises the question of whether the arms have something like minds of their own. Though the question is controversial, there is some observational evidence indicating that it could be so, he said. When an octopus is in an unfamiliar tank with food in the middle, some arms seem to crowd into the corner seeking safety while others seem to pull the animal toward the food, Godfrey-Smith explained, as if the creature is literally of two minds about the situation.

There may be other explanations for the observations. But whatever the answer, it seems likely that octopus intelligence is quite different from that of humans and, as researchers ponder the broader meaning of intelligence, may be as different as is likely to be encountered, short of finding it on other planets.

Thinking like an octopus

(Image: Tentacle, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from brunkfordbraun's photostream)

 


Seussian germs dismayed by cellophane

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 02:02 AM PST


On the Vintage Ads LiveJournal community, user Spuzzlightyear has a roundup post of favorite scanned ads of yesteryear -- fantastic stuff!

Best of everyone else...#3

Night Shade Books looking for an editor

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 02:00 AM PST

Looking for a gig in the glamorous world of publishing? Specialty SF publisherNight Shade Books (who put out Paoli Bacigalupi's Windup Girl, among other worthy books) is looking for an experienced full-time editor in San Francisco or NYC. (via IO9)

Freaky 1970 bubblecar concept vehicle, then and now

Posted: 19 Nov 2010 01:52 AM PST

Dinosaurs and Robots brings us a look at Luigi Colani's 1970 LeMans Concept Car, "a hand-sculpted, biomorphic, plexiglass-domed, pivoting cockpit pod onto the business end of a Lamborghini Miura," presently up for sale on eBay, in somewhat rough shape. This thing looks like the sort of car that the really gifted draw-ers in my grade three class used to obsessively sketch (minus the jet engine and the drone chute).

Other Makes: Luigi Colani LeMans Concept

 


Why are the feds surveilling and repeatedly detaining computer security researcher Moxie Marlinspike?

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 10:34 PM PST

moxie-marlinspike.jpg (Photo courtesy Dave Bullock)

Computer security researcher Moxie Marlinspike (Wikipedia, Web, Twitter) was detained by US border agents for several hours on Wednesday night. They searched his laptop and cell phones, demanded that he provide them with passwords for each, and later returned the devices to him. From Wired News:

[He] was met by two U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the door of his plane when he arrived at JFK airport on a Jet Blue flight from the Dominican Republic. The agents escorted him to a detention room where they held him for four and a half hours, he says. During that time, a forensic investigator arrived and seized Marlinspike's laptop and two cell phones, and asked for his passwords to access his devices. Marlinspike refused, and the devices were later returned to him.

"I can't trust any of these devices now," says Marlinspike, who asked that Threat Level not report his real name. "They could have modified the hardware or installed new keyboard firmware."

Marlinspike gained attention last year at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas when he revealed a serious vulnerability in the way internet browsers verify digital security certificates. The flaw would let a hacker create a fake web site for Bank of America or some other legitimate business, obtain a fake digital certificate and trick a browser into thinking the fake site was the legitimate one, allowing the hacker to conduct a phishing attack against unsuspecting users who entered their bank credentials into the fake site. He released two free tools that would help an attacker conduct such an attack.

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The incident sounds very much like what happened earlier this year to two other white hat hackers:

In July, security researcher Jake Appelbaum was intercepted at a New Jersey airport and detained. And earlier this month MIT researcher David House had his laptop seized when he deplaned at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on his way back from Mexico.

The full Wired News article is here, and the CNET piece is here. As the CNET piece elaborates, this incident is hardly the first for Moxie, and it doesn't sound as if it will be the last. There is some speculation that Moxie is being targeted because he has been identified as a friend and intellectual peer of Appelbaum, who is a volunteer with Wikileaks. Asked whether he too is a volunteer for Wikileaks, Moxie replied to CNET:


Definitely not. If anything, I'm slightly critical of WikiLeaks. I question the efficacy of that project. [...] I'm friends with Jake, and his equipment was seized. My name was in his contacts on his phone.


Moxie was mentioned on Boing Boing recently for something presumably unrelated: Hold Fast, a documentary about anarchy and sailing.

After four years in prison, Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer released

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 10:42 PM PST

A blogger in Egypt who served four years in prison on charges of insulting Islam and president Hosni Mubarak was finally released on Tuesday.
27_rg_blogger_ap_4.jpg The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, 26, known as Kareem Amer, was in bad health and was beaten by security officers before his release on Tuesday.

The Interior Ministry was not immediately available for comment.

The ANHRI statement is here. More about Kareem's case here.

(via BB Submitterator, thanks Talia)

Crab at market, Vietnam (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 05:47 PM PST

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Crabs at a market in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by BB reader Jenny Steeves (Twitter, blog) of Albuquerque, NM. Do take a peek at the larger size.

Pot growers portrayed as terrorists in joint (heh) US counter-terrorism drill

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 05:49 PM PST

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Over at Jeff Stein's Washington Post spy news column, an item on a counter-terrorism drill enacted by federal, state and local agencies in Northern California this Wednesday, November 17. During the exercise, participants playing the roles of local pot farmers set off bombs and took over the Shasta Dam, the nation's second largest, to free an imprisoned comrade:

According to an account in the Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight, the 12-hour drill was part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Critical Infrastructure Crisis Response Exercise Program, begun in 2003.

“More than 250 people from more than 20 agencies took part,” said Sheri Harral, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Reclamation, according to the paper.

Harral said the drill took 18 months to plan and cost the bureau alone $500,000. The other agencies covered their own costs.The paper made only passing reference to the scenario's designation of pot growers as terrorist villians.

Pot growers portrayed as terror threat (WaPo Spy Talk)

Photo: Participants in the November 17 counter-terrorism exercise, courtesy US Bureau of Reclamation.

Sober take on the "China took over the internet for 18 minutes" thing from April 2010

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 05:27 PM PST

"Did China's government really redivert 15% of the Internet's traffic for eighteen minutes in April, effortlessly intercepting sensitive traffic in flight, and generally creating a massively embarassing man-in-the-middle attack on vulnerable global communications? Well, yes and no. Mostly no."

How planes get mistaken for missiles

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 05:02 PM PST

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This photo sure looks like a rocket, but it's not. Taken on December 31, 2009, it shows the contrail of a jet plane, writes private pilot Mick West on his ContrailScience blog. The plane is moving horizontally. It just looks vertical because of the perspective. The photographer happens to be pretty closely lined up with the direction the jet is flying. That makes sense to me. I live under a flight path for the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport and, at night, I can go out to a nearby lake and watch the lights of planes as they appear to rise up—perfectly vertically—from behind the trees.

West actually took a photo of this same contrail from a very different angle. You can see it, behind the Home Depot sign, looking much, much more horizontal from this vantage point.

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Isn't it amazing what a difference perspective makes? As you might have guessed, West thinks the November 8th mystery missile was also a jet plane contrail, caught on camera from a discombobulating angle. He makes a pretty good argument for this theory in several posts on his blog. But I thought this older contrail was fascinating all on its own.

Wisconsin man blasts TV with shotgun to protest Bristol Palin's lackluster dance skills

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 05:40 PM PST

A 67-year-old man in rural Wisconsin grabbed his shotgun and blasted his TV after witnessing Bristol Palin's dance performance on "Dancing with the Stars." Everyone's a critic. The shooting resulted in an all-night SWAT team standoff. (Submitterator, thanks theatrechik77)

Did Hitler plan UFO attacks on London? (No. Not really.)

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 04:38 PM PST

doomsaucer.jpgLondonist slugs its post on this absolutely nutso piece from the the Daily Mail Hitler Planned UFO Attack On London, Claims Newspaper, while the paper itself goes no further than gonzo speculation: Did the Führer plan to attack London and New York in UFOs? See, it's that little bit of wiggle room that lets the real pros operate. And should anybody be so prickly as to take the paper to task for photoshopping an Iron Cross onto an old illustration of the alleged SchicksalSaucer der Himmel, which they freely admit they did, just because it looked bitchin' -- well. hell, the Mail never said the Nazis actually had the thing. They were just asking the question! (Also, for the record, nobody except me ever actually called the saucer the SchicksalSaucer der Himmel, which, roughly translated, means Doom Saucer of the Skies. But they could have!)

Spaceships powered by poop

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 04:28 PM PST

Human feces + Shewanella bacteria = Hydrogen to power future spacecraft?

Tour of America's only 'coon dog cemetery

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 04:14 PM PST

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My friend Stan Diel, a writer at the Birmingham News, recently traveled to northwest Alabama on a pilgrimage to America's only cemetery dedicated to raccoon-hunting dogs. (And only raccoon-hunting dogs. Notice the sign. They don't want you trying to bury your bird dog in there.)

I have a complicated relationship with 'coon dogs myself, having been bitten by my grandfather's as a small child. But it's hard to not get a little emotional when you see how much some of these people loved their dogs. Even those dead for decades have relatively fresh plastic flowers on their graves. There is love here. Repose the hounds.

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A monument to the 'coon hound. The previous version of this statue was vandalized, Stan says. The new one was rebuilt behind a tall fence topped with razor wire.

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The cemetery provides an outhouse for mourners. With paper.

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Machinima Expo: a two-day virtual film festival

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 04:11 PM PST

Success Begets Success from Freeta Kayo on Vimeo.


Richard Grove says:
The 3rd Annual Machinima Expo is a two-day virtual film festival which takes place this November 20th and 21st from 9am to 4pm (pacific time). The Expo is devoted to the art of machinima (real-time animation sometimes shot inside of video games like World of Warcraft). The Expo consists of a juried film competition with one Grand Prize, 3 Jury Prizes and a special prize (this year it's for the most accomplished Latin/Spanish film).

The two-day festival also features an awards presentation, interviews with machinima filmmakers, panel discussions and presentations of machinima programs like Muvizu, Reallusion's iClone and Moviestorm. We will also be screening all of the films selected for this year's Expo.

The 2010 Machinima Expo is free. Anyone with an internet connection and a browser can watch the live-feed of the programming and screen over 100 machinima films from all over the world.

Simultaneous screenings will also take place at various locations in the virtual world of Second Life. The full event schedule and Expo program are available at the Machinima Expo website.

Destroy All Movies!!!: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film special event in LA

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 04:12 PM PST


This weekend at Cinefamily in LA, a cinematic celebration of the amazing and massive new book Destroy All Movies!!!: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film.  

201011181551 From teenage ragers to mohawked post-apocalyptic gutteroids to actual, bona fide punks, this two-day multi-event mega movie showcase of pure power is a brick in the face of every film snob and/or high school principal!

The book's editors, Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly, will be on hand to casually guide you through the garbage-strewn annals of punk celluloid history. Kicking off the weekend's schedule is a fantastic clip show featuring '80s sitcoms and news broadcasts' bungling appropriation of punk's legacy -- climaxing in the riotous ABC Afterschool Special "The Day My Kid Went Punk!"  

The weekend's hijinx also include Dave Markey's Super-8 love letters to the L.A. underground scene The Slog Movie and Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, an ultra-rare midnight screening of the 1980 doc D.O.A. (featuring footage of the Sex Pistols' ill-fated '78 U.S. tour,), the urban menace exploitation classic Class of 1984, and the anthemic girl-power new wave flick Times Square!  

As well, Zack and Bryan will have books on-hand for purchase/signing -- so c'mon down, pick up a copy, and pogo 'til you puke!

"DESTROY ALL MOVIES!!!: The Complete Guide To Punks On Film" 2-Day Book Tour Meltdown 11/20 & 11/21

Meteorite Men interview

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 03:03 PM PST


Rachel Hobson interviewed the stars of Meteorite Men (On the Science Channel, see schedule here.) for the Space issue of MAKE magazine, but the magazine was only able to include a small portion of the interview. Make: Online ran the entire interview, and it's really fun.

What are the most common mistakes people make when hunting for meteorites?
We have, many, many times, been contacted by people who are certain they've found a meteorite. In most cases the hopeful have, in fact, picked up a piece of iron oxide, such a hematite or magnetite. Hematite, sometimes called kidney stone, can develop into unusual shapes and its surface often looks as if it's been, at one time, in a molten state (it hasn't). Magnetite is usually black, heavy and will adhere to a magnet, so this abundant earth rock is the most common "meteor-wrong." Early prospectors, in search of valuable metals like gold and silver, have left their mark across the planet, sometimes in the most remote and surprising places. Portable smelters were set up all over the United States, especially in the West, and the runoff, or residue, from those smelters is known as slag. Usually heavy, dark, with a burned appearance, slag is mistaken for meteorites all the time.

What are the top two or three things you wish you had known when you started hunting for meteorites?
We should have known how difficult it was actually going to be, so we could have been better prepared for the many disappointments and unsuccessful hunts that are part of a meteorite hunter's life.

It also would have helped if we had been more familiar the mechanics of strewnfields — zones in which numerous meteorites from the same parent body have fallen at the same time. Understanding how strewnfields form, and how meteorites are distributed within them can aid an experienced hunter with meteorite recovery.

Meteorite Men interview

A Do-It-Yourself Paper Digital Computer, 1959

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 02:52 PM PST

John Ptak of JF Ptak Science Books unearthed these plans for a paper computer from 1959.
201011181449This wonderful cut-away and paste-up template for a digital computer comes to us from the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 2, issue 9 for September 1959. 

The PAPAC-00 is a "2-register, 1-bit, fixed-instruction binary digital computer" and was submitted to the journal by Rollin P. Mayer (of the MIT Lincoln Lab).  There's a hunk of me that wants to make this thing really big -- cut out the individual pieces and then crash them out to 50" widths, pasted on found bits of cardboard packing from the neighborhood frame shop, and then piece the thing together as the world's largest pre-1960 1-bit paper computer.  Or maybe not. 


A Do-It-Yourself Paper Digital Computer, 1959

Interview with a bug artist

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 02:31 PM PST

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Cerentha Harris of Herman Miller's Lifework blog interviewed artist Kevin Clarke about his San Francisco workspace.

201011181426-1How long have you worked from home? And where is home?
I am in insect artist making traditional and non-traditional insect and natural history displays.  I have worked in my current San Francisco studio for the last 2 years, and the "Bug Room" resides in an old 2-bedroom apartment built a year after the 1906 earthquake.

Describe your style? How would you define your aesthetic?
A Cabinet of Curiosities meets modern museum.  I love mixing and linking detailed cultural objects (money, maps and stamps) with natural history.   An aesthetic I am fond of is apothecary and industrial looks – I am fascinated with scientific and industrial instruments.

Inspiration: Artist Kevin Clarke

38 atoms of antihydrogen captured in magnetic bottle

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 02:21 PM PST

201011181417 Tim Drew says, "First magnetic bottle for capturing antimatter is developed at CERN, successfully trapping 38 atoms of antihydrogen. Now to get cracking on that warp drive..."

Nature News: Antimatter held for questioning

Hacking Kinect onto a mobile robot

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 02:05 PM PST


Wp-Content Uploads 2010 11 Hacked-Kinect-Bot-1 MIT roboticist Philipp Robbel hacked a Microsoft Kinect sensor onto an iRobot Create, essentially an open source Roomba without the vacuum. The KinectBot can create its own 3D maps as it moves around a space. The operator can also use natural gestures to direct the robot, like pointing where it should go next.
"Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect to See The World, Obey Your Commands" (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

My neighbor's groovy "conversation pit" perfectly preserved from 1974

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 01:51 PM PST

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201011181347 During a recent trip to my New Jersey hometown, I had a chance to revisit the "Conversation Pit" located in the basement of the house next door to where I grew up.

The Pit (as we called it) is quite literally unchanged since the day it was completed in 1974 -- original pillows, hanging basket chairs, groovy wall graphics, foam-padded lounge areas, stainless-steel mobile, track lights, and all.  As kids, we were never allowed to play in The Pit, lest we soil the pristine white shag with our grubby little paws. We always wondered what the adults did in there, and our banishment only added to the mystery.

Anyhow, during my visit, my neighbor mentioned she was considering the idea of remodeling The Pit. This triggered howls of protest both from her own daughter, and from me.  I threatened to alert the Smithsonian Institution of The Pit's existence. "If you go ahead with the remodel," I warned, "The Smithsonian will slap you with a Historic Landmark designation so fast it'll make your lava lamp bubble over."

She laughed, then relented. The current plan is to "restore" the pit by simply replacing the carpet, and leaving it at that. Whew!

My Neighbor's Basement Conversation Pit

3D printing service from Ponoko

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 01:43 PM PST

In 2007, Ponoko began offering a 2D laser-cutting service that let people upload their designs and sell manufactured items online. Today, Ponoko announced a 3D manufacturing service called Ponoko Personal Factory 4.
201011181340 CloudFab has joined our global digital making network, giving Ponoko customers the ability to create 3D printed designs. All with no set up fees, no minimum orders, and a free 365-day replacement policy.

We've added five new 3D printable materials to our materials catalog including durable white plastic, superfine plastic, rainbow color ceramic, stainless steel and gold plated stainless steel.

Ponoko Personal Factory 4 will auto price, auto check, and auto fix your 3D designs. We've also got 5 new starter kits for 3D modeling softwares: Alibre, Autodesk 3ds Max, Blender, Google SketchUp, and Solidworks.

The ! Exclamation Lamp is a glimpse of what's possible: laser-cutting for flat surfaces, 3D printing for rounded and complex shapes, and electronics hardware to "bring everything to life." It's available as a free download in the Ponoko marketplace so you can customize your own.  

Ponoko Personal Factory 4

Interview with tin toy robot collector

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 01:44 PM PST

Articles Wp-Content Uploads 2010 11 Atomiccropped Articles Wp-Content Uploads 2010 11 Lilliput Articles Wp-Content Uploads 2010 11 Smokingcropped
Justin Pinchot is the world expert on vintage ray guns, space toys, and tin robots. Today, Collectors Weekly posted an interview with Pinchot about the history of Japanese toy robots, and their post-WWII boom as an export item. From Collectors Weekly:
After the war, the small battery-operated motor was devised, and the Japanese were the first to put them in toys. Most toy makers in other countries were still producing clockwork toys, but the Japanese embraced batteries and small motors. They were the only game in town as far as that was concerned. They innovated that type of toy, and it became very popular. From the early 1950s all the way to the late '60s, they dominated the market because of this innovation, and because the toys were very inexpensive.

In many ways, the Japanese toys of the 1950s were updates of automatons from the 1920s, which were windup toys. They could walk, but they were also very detailed. Take a mechanical fortune teller, for instance—her eyes would open and close, her head would nod, and her hands would move. The problem was these toys were horrendously expensive.

The Japanese were able to affect that same motion much more cheaply with battery-operated motors. So they were producing something that previously had been very expensive but all of a sudden was very affordable.

"Attack of the Vintage Toy Robots! Justin Pinchot on Japan's Coolest Postwar Export"

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