MallGoth emporium Hot Topic sells a $54.50 Princess Leia hoodie with integrated hair buns. I'm thinking mother's day.

STAR WARS HER UNIVERSE PRINCESS LEIA GIRLS HOODIE (via Geekologie)

Live Webcam of tourists and the drivers who hate them at the famed Abbey Road crossing. Abbey Road Studios - Crossing Webcam (via @chris_carter_)

This short film was produced by the film unit of the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the 1950s, and explains the principles behind the first accurate atomic clock, which was designed by Louis Essen and built at the National Physical Laboratory in 1955. The NPL's YouTube channel has other videos of interest to science geeks. (thanks, obadiahlemon)

A post by Slashdot user Dangerous_Minds summarizes a series ZeroPaid's Drew Wilson, who has been examining 20 file-sharing studies from the decade-plus-long filesharing wars. Time and again, the studies show that the effect on markets is marginal, and that the big entertainment companies are opposed to file-sharing a means of suppressing competition and innovation:

While most writers would simply criticize the study and move on, Wilson took it a step further and looked in to what file-sharing studies have really been saying throughout the years. What he found was an impressive 19 of 20 studies not getting any coverage. He launched a large series detailing what these studies have to say on file-sharing. The first study suggests that file-sharing litigation was a failure. The second study said that p2p has no effect on music sales. The third study found that the RIAA suppresses innovation. The fourth study says that the MPAA has simply been trying to preserve its oligopoly. The fifth study says that even when one uses the methodology of one download means one lost sale, the losses amount to less than $2 per album. The studies, so far, are being posted on a daily basis and are certainly worth the read."

What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing

Boing Boing reader Renee Rendler-Kaplan of Chicago, IL went to the National Restaurant Association's trade show, and shot this photograph of a terrified pizza pie. I don't really know what this is, actually. I just know that I will never look at pizza the same way again. And, the strange orange color reminds me of Tanning Mom. Or John Boehner. If you're in the area, the NRA expo continues through May 8. (via Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

Asymco's Horace Dediu and Dirk Schmidt, quoting Clayton Christensen: "The company has been slowly rolling its stores out across the world for [close to 50] years; and yet nobody has copied IKEA."

It's just a throwaway line in an excellent comparison of Apple and Ikea's retail operations, but does anyone remember Stor? From the NYT:

In April IKEA sued STOR, asserting that STOR copied some of IKEA's catalogue pages and its store design.

"The lawsuit is not about copying the concept - the similarity of the furniture is not an issue - but about infringing the copyright of the catalogue and copying the visual appearance of the store's setup and display, to the extent that the person familiar with IKEA thinks that STOR is IKEA," said Alan Zelnick, IKEA's lawyer.

IKEA also sought an injunction to prevent STOR from distributing its 1988 catalogue.

And the outcome, from Wikipedia:

STØR Furnishings International Inc. was an American furniture chain based in City of Industry, CA, that opened in 1987. It sold European-style furniture and ready-to-assemble furnishings. ... IKEA filed a lawsuit against the company shortly after opening, claiming copyright infringement, and was settled in 1988 with STØR being forced to change the layout of their stores and advertising. STØR was acquired by IKEA in 1992.

For more than 10 years, Susann Bashir worked as a fiber optics network builder for AT&T in Missouri. The Kansas City Star reports that she was subjected to daily religious discrimination and harassment during the last three years of her employment there—co-workers called her a "towelhead," and asked if she planned to blow up the building.

She was already pursuing a religious discrimination case against her employer when, one day, her boss grabbed her head-scarf and exposed her hair during a routine meeting in his office. The head and hair are considered a "private part" for Muslim women, so snatching her hijab was perceived as a powerful personal violation.

Snip from The Kansas City Star:

Bashir sued, and this week a Jackson County jury awarded her $5 million in punitive damages against Southwestern Bell/AT&T. (...) Thursday’s overall award appears to be the largest jury verdict for a workplace religious discrimination case in Missouri history.

(Thanks, Oxblood Ruffin; thumbnail of photo via KC Star by Todd Feeback)

Phil Torrone of Adafruit sent me a bag full of maker skill patches. When my 9-year-old daughter came home from school today, her eyes popped out like a Tex Avery wolf. I told her she could have them all, but she has to earn them! I'll work with her to help her earn the LED patch first.

An unsourced/unidentified photo of a man's (?) foot with a very good, detailed and shadowed Converse All-Stars tattooed upon it, in stylish red. No mention if he has the other foot done, nor why he left off the toes and soles (that may be a limitation of tattoo technology, I suppose).

Converse Shoe Tattooed on Foot (via Geekologie)

Here's the 15th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk!

Our maker this week is Matthew Borgatti. Matthew makes so many things it's hard to even begin to describe it all: musical instruments, science fiction-themed jewelry, folded paper creations, realistic passports to hackerspaces, ceramic "brass knuckles," and on and on. This was a really great interview, and I'm sure you are going to enjoy it. Here's a terrific page of information Matthew created for listeners of this podcast.

In the show, I also talk a bit about the new issue of MAKE, Vol 30, which is available on newsstands now and by subscription. We've got a great line up of projects in this issue, including how-to's on making indestructable LED Torches, an electronic Magic 8 Box Fortune Teller, all sorts of home automation projects, and our cover story -- a very easy to make and fun to fly remote control stunt flyer.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated a robotic bird that lands perched on someone's hand. From UIUC:

Perching is routinely used by birds to land on objects such as tree branches, power wires, or building ledges. According to the researchers, there are two factors that make perching challenging to engineer: 1) the maneuver’s duration is very short, on the same order as the aircraft dynamics, and 2) a high level of position accuracy is required for a successful perched landing.

“Our aerial robot concept lacks a vertical tail for improved agility, similar to birds, which renders it dynamically unstable and exacerbates both of these factors,” (postdoc Aditya) Paranjape said. “We choose a perching maneuver to demonstrate the capabilities of our articulated-winged aircraft concept, novel guidance algorithms, and control design. In particular, the ability to perform perched landings on a human hand endows our robot with the ability to operate around humans.”

"First-ever demonstration of autonomous bird-like robot perching on a human hand"