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

Joel posted this futurtastic photo over at Boing Boing Gadgets. He snagged it from dog'S faint which is a delightful compendium of completely unrelated found photos.
Link to BB Gadgets, Link to dog'S faint!!

BB pal and FM COO Jason Weisberger felt that the fancy camera he ordered from Cameta Camera, via Amazon, was poorly packed for shipping. He called the company to complain and they were rude to him. So he posted a bad review of the shop on Amazon. The next day, Cameta Camera offered him $75 to take down his review. Jason has the details over at Dethroner. From the email he received from Cameta Camera:

We are ready to issue you a credit for $75.00 back to your Amazon account (which is the original freight paid). Our’ only concern is that in the past we have made an accommodation for a customer but they have left us negative feedback anyway. If you would be willing to remove your negative feedback remark to our account (and then email me to let me know that it has been done) I will issue the credit right away. We pride ourselves on good customer service and we are willing to work with you.

If you do decide to remove the feedback left in exchange for the refund please follow the instructions below.

Link

Emi Guner says: "Dear secret force of the universe, be it intelligent or just accident/chance or cause and effect, whatever you believe in, can we just agree that sometimes the best stuff in life is almost free, found in a veggie bag in your fridge.

"Unfortunately, my son castrated the poor thing with his teeth before I had a chance to make money off it." Link

Gord says: "Cory's blogged about Ranjit Bhatnagar before ('Crazy' performance). Here's his latest artbot. I *love* the way this guy's mind works!"

Simple automatic instruments are constructed from local materials and objects on site. The system learns the sounds it can make by trying out its instruments, and then uses its range of sounds to try to reproduce the rhythmic and melodic qualities of sounds such as the voices of visitors. It then loops and alters these imitative sequences into improvised compositions. (That last part's not done yet, so you won't see it in the video.)

In this example, the source audio is a bit of the soundtrack from the movie Citizen Kane, and the noisemakers are a set of found object percussion machines and an electromagnetically fretted electric guitar. Link

Artist/prankster Mark Jenkins and Evan Roth of Graffiti Research Laboratory designed this fine t-shirt as an homage to, er, "Black" Power.
Link

The funnyhunters at Nerve have compiled a list of the 50 greatest commercial parody videos of all time. Above, the ecstasy egg. I could not agree more with their number one choice.

Previously: Fifty greatest comedy sketches of all time

Max Silvestri of "Gabe and Max" fame has posted a response to the creepy "Man Stuck in An Elevator For 41 Hours" video that's been floating around the youtubes lately. Here it is on 236.com, or here it is on YT. (thanks, Max!)

Previously on Boing Boing tv: Gabe and Max answer Bing Boing readers.

I'm a research director at Institute for the Future, a 40-year-old non-profit thinktank that helps companies, governments, and foundations think about long-term future trends to make better decisions today. For the last six months, we've been researching the "future of making," exploring how the stuff of our world may be researched, invented, designed, manufactured, and distributed in the next ten years. We held an expert workshop where we brought in a terrific group of makers, conducted interviews, and did a ton of reading on the history of DIY culture. At last weekend's Maker Faire, we released the results of our research in the form of a visual knowledge map, summarizing drivers, trends, and implications. Almost all of our research at IFTF becomes free and public after a year, but this map was made public right away and is Creative Commons-licensed. We hope you enjoy it! From the introduction to the Future of Making Map:

THE FUTURE OF MAKING IS BEING REMADE

Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.

Inspired by the hackers, crafters, artisans, and tinkerers who embody this “maker mindset,” we set out to reverse engineer the future forces behind this transformation. Many of us were already immersed in the DIY culture, hacking code, soldering circuits, creating media, and even tending farms. So to learn more, we reached out to our own communities, brought together innovators at an expert workshop, scoured blogs and magazines, and attended numerous informal gatherings where makers talk shop. It turns out that “do it yourself” may be a misnomer for this decidedly social movement; “do it ourselves” is a more apt phrase. Individual makers are amplified by social technologies that connect ideas, designs, techniques, and, of course, people, to revolutionize the process of innovation and production.

There is much to be learned from the maker mindset of collaboration, creativity, and open access. Yet the maker culture will not replace traditional industry. In the future, traditional manufacturers and maverick makers will be closely linked— sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, but frequently blurring the boundaries that separate them. Success will occur when the two cultures are woven together in new and interesting ways. We hope that our map will help guide you in those experiments as you engage with the Future of Making.

Link

Susannah Breslin wrote a piece for Salon today about the apparent suicide of the so-called "D.C. Madam," Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

When her 76-year-old mother, Blanche Palfrey, called 911 just before 11 a.m., the emergency operator asked if her daughter was still hanging from the rafter. "Yes," said the madam's weeping mother, who had regularly accompanied her daughter to court the month previous, "I can't move her. I'm 76 years old."

Breslin interviewed three women who are currently documenting online their past and present lives as sex workers, and asked for their thoughts.

Another sex worker I spoke with, who writes online about her call girl experiences but requested anonymity for this story, was pained by the news of Palfrey's death as well as the related older news of the death of University of Maryland professor turned call girl Brandy Britton, 43, who killed herself in January 2007 while awaiting trial on prostitution charges. Britton was a one-time employee of Palfrey's; after Britton was found hanging in her living room, Palfrey pronounced, ironically: "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."

The call girl I interviewed was struck by the emotional stories behind these public deaths. "The first thing I thought about was the incredible isolation that both of them probably felt," she said. "Because you're doing something that's perceived to be so morally wrong that you're immediately outside society, as a prostitute or a madam. You've got this secret life or a compartmentalized life, and then to be pushed out there and villainized -- I can only imagine the incredible isolation they must have felt."

As a sex worker, she went on, you live a "double life." A madam whom she worked for before she went freelance was intensely paranoid, "crazy," prone to anxious late-night phone calls. "It got to her. She would call me up and panic, thinking they were out to get her. It was the psychology of sex work, the fear of being outed."

Link. Image: Reuters.

UPDATE: details of Palfrey's suicide note released: Link. (thanks Susannah).

Victoria Modise, of the City of Johannesburg, South Africa, lost her ID and was told she had to get fingerprinted to get a new one. The problem is that Modise has no arms. Apparently the SA Human Rights Commission is "deeply concerned" about the incident. From The Herald Online:

(Spokesman Vincent) Moaga said the commission was deeply concerned by this incident...

“Home Affairs should look at international practices and see what system can be put in place to assist people with disabilities to get their IDs.”

Link (via Fortean Times!)

Tombland perfectly captures the happy horror of clown faced pork luncheon meat in this photo. Click link for complete image. Link (via Vegan.com )

Jim Warren recently gave a talk about the origins of Famous Monsters of Filmland, which he launched in 1958.

His initial inspiration for Famous Monsters of Filmland was noticing that kids were staying up late to watch old Universal horror movies on TV. In his youth, kids went and saw monster movies at neighborhood theaters. But with the coming of TV, older theaters were being dismantled, leaving the movie studios with a lot of black and white movies which they sold quickly in package deals to TV stations.

He described the first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland as having been laid-out on a living room table and financed with money loaned by his father. When the first run of 200,000 issues finally hit the stands, he was left with a mere $36.00 in his pocket. This initial run sold out in a manner of days and he realized the initial hunch he had to do it was a good one. The second run sold out just as quickly and the magazine continued to be published for the next 20 plus years.

Link

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid took a bunch of fantastic photos and videos of Maker Faire, which was held this past weekend in San Mateo CA. I had a wonderful time at the Faire, and it was fun meeting all the BB readers who kindly introduced themselves to me! Link

Jason sez, "A new charter school in Wilmington, DE is in the works. The charter? Homeland security! Young adults, titled 'cadets,' will be trained in SWAT and 'prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator' skills. Kids are definitely our guinea pigs: give it to them at school, at home and at their Disneyland vacation!"

The Project Manager for the Delaware Academy for Public Safety and Security, New Castle Attorney Thomas Little, signed a contract with Innovative Schools, a professional firm which will coordinate the mechanics of preparing the school for its eventual opening...

The first Principal of the institution is to be Dr. Fred Fitzgerald. A retired Captain in the Marine Corps, Fitzgerald teaches English, speech and debate at New Castle Christian Academy. Fitzgerald is also a former executive for Coca Cola in Jacksonville, Florida, and a former Director of Operations for the Port of Wilmington.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Tamu sez, "The National Marrow Donor Program is running a campaign from May 5 to 19, but I don't feel they are really emphasizing that registration is free to the first 10 000 people who register with them online during this period. In a previous BB post, a woman really wanted to help and said she couldn't afford it. This enables people who want to get on the registry who haven't been able to afford it to reigister online with a cheek swab kit, WITHOUT EVEN LEAVING HOME. Ethnicity plays a huge part in matching. My brother's search led me to discover there are only 1633 people registered in Canada who are of African descent. There are only 233 registered people in Canada who are Chinese. The matches from these people are going to come from other countries... maybe. The US has a severe shortage for many donor pools and needs to diversify their donor pool as well."

If you are not a US resident, this is still important information. Even if you do not live in the US, people who register in the US could save the life of a person anywhere in the world, maybe even where you live. So tell someone about this.

The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) has finally included the details of free registration during its Thanks Mom campaign.

During the event, costs to join the Registry online or at a bone marrow drive are paid for by generous partners and contributors so that it is

Free for the first 46,000 people who join the registry via the NMDP.

This includes the first 10,000 who register for a kit online.

In the US, you get the inside of your cheek swabbed. You get a kit at home or you go to a sponsored NMDP bone marrow drive.

To register online or find the nearest NMDP bone marrow drive, go to www.marrow.org.

Link (Thanks, Tamu!)

See also: Seeking marrow donor for animation writer/blogger Emru Townsend

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits with John Gaeta, the Academy Award-winning Visual Effects supervisor of the Matrix trilogy, to learn more about his digital craft in the new film Speed Racer. This latest Wachowski brothers project reinterprets the classic 1960s Japanese anime series of the same name, and opens in theaters nationwide on May 9.

Gaeta explains how he used VR "bubbles" and a mysterious team known as the "world unit" to create the film's "poptimistic photo-anime" feel. The live action Speed Racer is saturated in a candy-colored palette so rich, audiences may just leave the theater with a contact sugar high.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

And Gaeta adds a special message for Boing Boing tv viewers, who are already well accustomed to all things digital -- "For optimal viewing experience, see Speed Racer at a digital cinema or IMAX theater." He's not kidding, with a feature like this, analog projection just doesn't do the work justice.

View interactive samples of the digital building blocks behind the movie in a related online feature in VRMAG, "Speed Racer Uncovered."

(Special thanks: John Gaeta; Andy and Larry Wachowski; and David Pescovitz)

Amnesty UK has produced four short films on China's human rights records, released in the runup to this summer's Olympics in Beijing. The first video's online now: Torchure. Link (Thanks, Kristyan!)

I've just put up my site for Little Brother, my young adult novel about hacker kids who use technology to reclaim the Bill of Rights from the DHS after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Included on the site are:

• Creative Commons licensed downloads of the whole book
• An easy way to donate copies of the book to school classrooms
• Links to buy the book from various etailers (and an offer to get a signed, inscribed copy shipped direct to you by Borderlands Books in San Francisco)
• A place to put your remixes of the book
  

Still to come: the tour schedule, more Instructables HOWTOs, and lots of other news. Link