You know all those Orwellian cameras that line the streets of London? Pretty much useless in crime-fighting. Scotland Yard's solution? More cameras!

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

Link (Thanks, Clifton!)

The Critter Cruiser Race Car is a toy car powered by a hamster wheel -- for when your hamster gets tired of rolling around the house in his little ball. Link (via Gizmodo)

Mutant Rob sez, "This is a NY Times article that refers to a paper which says 'Since 2000, patent judges have been appointed by a government official without the constitutional power to do so.' This could 'undo thousands of patent decisions concerning claims worth billions of dollars.' Big news."

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the government had no comment. “There is really nothing we can say at this time,” he said.

But the Justice Department has already all but conceded that Professor Duffy is right. Given the opportunity to dispute him in a December appeals court filing, government lawyers said only that they were at work on a legislative solution.

They did warn that the impact of Professor Duffy’s discovery could be cataclysmic for the patent world, casting “a cloud over many thousands of board decisions” and “unsettling the expectations of patent holders and licensees across the nation.” But they did not say Professor Duffy was wrong.

If it was a legislative mistake, it may turn out to be a big one. The patent court hears appeals from people and companies whose patent applications were turned down by patent examiners, and it decides disputes over who invented something first. There is often a lot of money involved.

Link (Thanks, Mutant Rob!)

Avi sez, "Michael Pollan gives his most practical lecture yet @ Google. Pollan's 12 heuristics have been most helpful during my year shopping for veggies at Berkley Bowl:) I grew up buying fresh produce at atmospheric places like this in Mumbai and do fervently hope that vivacious local markets trump impersonal food-processing corporations."

Pollan's In Defense of Food is a fascinating treatise on eating and food, taking as its central tenet, "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much," and cutting through all the "nutritionism" science that proposes to feed us on individual molecules instead of whole food. Link (Thanks, Avi!)

See also: In Defense of Food: NPR interview with Michael Pollan about "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Paul sez,

I just spent some quality time poring over the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) tables, which are reported each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and determine the U.S. inflation rate. According to the release, prices for urban residents have risen 4.0% over the past year, and it's fun to look at the different numbers and see how they contribute to the overall result.

For example, in the Transportation category (up 8.2%), a dramatic increase in Gasoline prices (26%) is balanced in part by a more heavily-weighted decline in the cost of New vehicles (-1.1%). In the Food and beverages category (up 4.4%), relatively modest increases in Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs (3.8%) and in Fruits and vegetables (1.7%) are counteracted by sharper increases in Cereals and baking products (8.1%) and in Dairy and related products (11%).

Meanwhile, the entire index is pulled lower by something called "Owners' equivalent rent of primary residence," in the Housing category, which accounts for 23.942% of all expenditures and rose 2.6%. I'm a layperson in economics and statistics, but I'm hooked-- I'm looking forward to seeing April's numbers, which come out May 14.

Link

Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its series of HOWTOs inspired by my latest novel, Little Brother, a young adult novel about hacker kids who fight the DHS with technology in order to restore the Bill of Rights to America.

This week, it's HOWTO build a spice-mister, a low-intensity edible pepper-spray to douse your food with (one of the characters in the book is a serious capsaicin junkie). Being the kind of guy who'd brush his teeth with Tobasco if I could, I love this one.

Putting the spice mister together is not hard. Simply remove the pump, fill with your choice of hot sauce, and put the pump back in.

To add a quick burst of intense flavor to your food, hold the mister a few inches above the dish and spray. Repeat until desirable heat is reached.

Keep it away from your face, and never spray at anyone else - capsaicin in the eyes hurts like hell. Pepper spray is nasty, evil stuff and should never, ever be used on anything except food.

Link, Link to feed for Little Brother Instructables

Leif says: "Bradley J. Gake has put a set of absolutely incredible 50/60s Los Angeles Press Photographers Annuals on Flickr." Link

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we learned that Steve Ballmer kicks Steve Jobs's ass, that furry crocodiles prefer Amstrad, and that John is consorting with space prostitutes, sort of.

We toyed with a feeble-looking convergence gadget, a pair of spy sunglasses; a robot vacuum swarm; and a new batch of tiny motherboards. Seeing a rotating DIY screw-clock with electro-ocular implants, we found Peter Jensen's retrofuturistic Nixie Tube clocks; announced the winner of this weekend's Team Fortress 2 smackdown; praised Microsoft for donating 360s; and gawked over a vacuum-tube violin mod.

That's a lot of stuff to take back to the store. Let's hope we don't end up on a shady database of shoppers who issue chargebacks.

On the most recent Sound of Young America, podcast Jesse Thorn interviewed David Hadju, the author of The Ten Cent Plague, a book about the anti-comic book panic of the 1950s. Link