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How Edmund Wilson said NO

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 24 May 2013 02:42:44 +0000

Update: Here's Mark's first post of this, from 2009

Here's literary critic Edmund Wilson's form-letter for turning down requests from strangers. As Tim Ferriss notes, Wilson wasn't a hermit or antisocial, but he maximized the time he spent socializing with the people he liked by not letting strangers gobble up his time:

Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him without compensation to:
read manuscripts
< contribute to books or periodicals
do editorial work
judge literary contests
deliver lectures
address meetings
make after-dinner speeches
broadcast;

Under any circumstances to:
contribute to or take part in symposiums
take part in chain-poems or other collective compositions
contribute manuscripts for sales
donate copies of his books to libraries
autograph books for strangers
supply personal information about himself
supply photographs of himself
allow his name to be used on letter-heads
receive unknown persons who have no apparent business with him.

The Best Decline Letter of All-Time: Edmund Wilson (via Making Light)

Beautiful vintage jetpack-futurist car

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 24 May 2013 01:28:19 +0000

On Super Punch, set of photos of a beautiful, enbubbled, betailfinned Los Angeles land yacht spotted on the 101. Hoo-ah.

Saw a this on the 101 in Los Angeles today. It was caravanning with a bunch of classic cars.

3D printing: with 2D; with holograms; and all-in-one 3D scanning

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 24 May 2013 00:38:50 +0000

Here's a video from last week's Maker Faire showcasing technologies for printing out 3D-ish objects using 2D printers: ModelBox turns a 3D model into a series of 2D images you print on acetate and set into a frame to cheaply and quickly prototype/simulate the 3D object; Zebra Images turns 3D models into holograms; and Lynx Laboratories demos its all-in-one 3D scanner.

3D Printing on a 2D printer?! - Maker Faire 2013 (Thanks, Francis!)

Monster money!

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 24 May 2013 00:03:00 +0000

Google Translate says that the caption on this image is Japanese for "Bill of surprised frontispiece monster world." I can't really hazard any guesses beyond that, but hey, monster money!

『びっくり口絵怪物世界のお札』 (via Crazy Abalone)

3D printed bio-absorbable splint saves baby with otherwise fatal impaired breathing

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 23:00:43 +0000

Elijah sez, "Recent news has been all about the commercial use of 3D printing - from food to weaponry. But recently, doctors at the University of Michigan used quick thinking and 3D printing technology to save the life of a 2-month-old child with a rare disease."

The scaffold was made of a bioresorbable material, polycaprolactone, so it would dissolve and be absorbed by the body after about three years. At this point, his airways should be fully developed and no longer need the stent.
The doctors used high-resolution X-ray scans of one of Kaiba's healthy windpipes to design a computer model for the life-saving brace.
Laser-equipped 3-D printers crafted the device in a few hours, and the university obtained emergency clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implant it on February 9, 2012 at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor.
"It was amazing. As soon as the splint was put in, the lungs started going up and down for the first time and we knew he was going to be OK," said Green.

3-D Printing Saves Baby's Life [VIDEO] (Thanks, Elijah Wolfson!)

Prosthetic tentacle

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:37:23 +0000

Taiwanese design student Kaylene Kau created this motorized prosthetic tentacle for a class project: "For this project we were pushed by our Professor to push the boundaries of current upper-limb prosthetic design. Through extensive research I found that the prosthetic functioned as an assistant to the dominant functioning hand. The prosthetic needed to be both flexible and adjustable in order to accommodate a variety of different grips."

PROSTHETIC ARM (via Kadrey)

How London cops use social media to spy on protest movements

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:00:51 +0000

Juha sez, "If you're going to build a protest movement, it might be better to stay off Facebook and Twitter because the cops are fully tuned into social media these days. The Open Source Intelligence Unit at London's Metropolitan Police Service has a staff of seventeen who work seven days a week - to track social media feed back and to monitor community tension. Having a sense of humour and understanding of slang gives humans the edge over social media surveillance software, UK cops reckon. The British cops are worried about 4G mobile broadband though because it'll generate much more data such as video."

The unit monitored some 32 million social media articles during the Olympics, with 10,300 tweets being posted every second during the opening ceremony.
“Companies will tell your that sentiment analysis from a piece of software is about 56 percent accurate … we would say it's lower, because it doesn’t pick up humour or slang,” Ertogral said.
In addition to looking at trends, he said the unit was also exploring association to establish influencers, particularly for protest movements.
“So we’re trying to build friend lists on Facebook, who’s connected to who, who are the influencers out there etc.”

Police tap social media in wake of London attack [Charis Palmer/IT News]

(Thanks, Juha!)

Walktopus: 5' tall bronze

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:01:01 +0000

There's a lot of personality in Scott Musgrove's 5' tall bronze entitled "Walktopus." If that's a bit on the large side, there's a 20" version, too.

Sculpture (Thanks, Scott!)

Vermont passes anti-patent-troll law

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:00:13 +0000

Vermont has passed a state-level law that allows companies to sue patent trolls who make deceptive claims in legal threats against them, and has used it to sue the notorious trolls at MPHJ, who say that anyone who scans a document over a network owes them $1000. However, it's not clear that the law will stand, as this is arguably federal jurisdiction.

The new law, believed to be the first in the nation, allows courts to consider if a claim is deceptive, specifies factors that can be considered as evidence, and provides for damages or relief to Vermont companies wrongly pressured into paying licensing fees or a settlement. The Vermont attorney general also can conduct civil investigations and bring civil action against violators.
"This bill will help to protect our good Vermont businesses from unscrupulous patent trolls who take advantage of them through bad faith claims of patent infringement. It will help us grow jobs," the governor said...
...Coinciding with the new law, the state filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing a Delaware company of patent trolling. The attorney general's office sued Wilmington-based MPHJ Technology Investments and its 40 subsidiary companies operating in Vermont.
The office alleged that MPHJ claimed to have a patent on the process of scanning documents and attaching them to emails via a network and that MPHJ sent letters making deceptive statements to small businesses in Vermont, demanded money, and threatened litigation over licensing fees

Vt Gov Signs Novel Law Against False Patent Claims [Lisa Rathke/Associated Press]

(Thanks, awjt!)

Concept design for a bike-light that projects a grid on the ground, highlighting bumps/holes

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:06:37 +0000

A team from the University of Sichuan won the Red Dot Design award for a concept design called "Lumigrid" -- a bike-light that projects a grid on the ground ahead of the rider, making terrain irregularities easy to spot:

Lumigrids can project a grid onto the ground. On a flat road surface, the grid will consist of standard squares. On a rough road surface, the grids will deform accordingly. By observing the motion and deformation of the grids, the rider can intuitively understand the landforms ahead. In addition, the luminous grids can make it easier for nearby pedestrians and vehicles to notice the bicycle, reducing the likelihood of collision.
Lumigrids can be fixed onto the bicycle’s handlebars. Its power is supplied by either an internal battery or by the rotation of the bicycle’s wheels. It has only one button so that the rider can easily use it while riding. The first press will turn on the power, the second press will change the mode of projection, and holding the button down for two seconds will turn the power off. Lumigrids has three modes with different grid sizes that can be used to adapt to different situations: normal mode (140x180mm), high-speed mode (140x260mm), and team mode (300x200mm)."

Lumigrids (via OhGizmo)

Arthur C Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:19:36 +0000

Mark writes,

The University of California, San Diego and the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation are launching a major center to better understand, enhance and enact the gift of human imagination. Sir Arthur C. Clarke created extraordinary visions of the future that continue to provide insight into the human condition. He transformed our lives by developing the ideas of GPS and satellite communication. We are inspired by this legacy and want to continue it by focusing on Sir Arthur's greatest gift: imagination.
We will bring together thinkers and doers in the arts and information technology, in neuroscience, cognitive science and the physical sciences to help us understand the nature of imagination and to build tools and develop methods that will extend imagination. We have developed our initial approach with a cross-disciplinary team of some of UCSD's world famous scientists, artists and scholars, linking them with a group of award-winning science fiction authors birthed at UCSD.

Uh, birthed? As in, born in the university hospital? I honestly have no idea what they mean here. Maybe "berthed" (sleeping on campus)? Or maybe metaphorically "birthed" by graduating from UCSD?

Center for Human Imagination

Pee-Wee Herman nastygrams Pee-Wee fan-fest to death

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:00:41 +0000

Pee-Wee Herman has nastygrammed the organizer of "Pee-Wee Over Louisville," a fan-festival organized by the guy who helped kick off the national Lewbowski Fests. The Pee-Wee festival is dead. I didn't give a damn about Pee-Wee getting caught beating off in a dirty movie theater, but this news makes me want to take away my daughter's Pee-Wee's Playhouse DVDs. I don't care what Pee-Wee does among consenting adults, but bullying his fans is really poor form.

Immigration woes for Amy's Bakery co-owner

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:16:30 +0000

More on Amy's Bakery, the restauranteurs who staged a world-beating social-media meltdown: Sami "Mr Amy" Bouzaglo faces deportation -- tl;dr: he's an Israeli citizen who's been banned from Germany and France for drug offenses and faces an immigration hearing in the USA. (Thanks, Matthew!)

Extreme Bloody Mary, Wisconsin style

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:56:50 +0000

Take a look at this impressive, heavily loaded Bloody Mary, served at O'Davey's Irish Pub & Restaurant in Fond du Lac. (Also known as Davey's.)
This ultimate hangover cure is topped with an extensive beer chaser consisting of pop corn, bacon, peanuts, beans, sausage, pretzel, sliders, a pickle and (this is Wisconsin after all) a cracker and cheese curd. Plus a Brewers flag.

Wildest Bloody Mary you've ever seen creating buzz for Wisconsin [Gitte Laasby/Journal Sentinel]

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

3D printed shotgun slugs (suck)

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:00:59 +0000

As the 3D printed gun story unfolds, many (including me) have noted that you can't print ammo. However, you can print shotgun slugs on a 3D printer, but they suck:

Heeszel was surprised at the first two. “I didn’t think it would go through the first piece of wood at all, much less hit anything,” he says. But he also called them more of a novelty than a practical bullet. “I thought the thing was kinda lame, but I realize there’s a lot of novelty with the 3-D printed gun, and I thought it was kind of timely. But overall I think they’re kind of crappy little rounds,” he adds...
“I might be a redneck from Tennessee, but I love the technology,” Griffy says. Griffy, who runs a YouTube account ArtisanTony — where he also shows off a printable knife and buckshot rounds — tells Danger Room he printed the slugs more for their own enjoyment. “Because a real gun shooting plastic bullets is more fun than a plastic gun shooting real bullets,” he says. “You have to spend six hours printing a barrel that you’re going to use one time, and it’s not as much fun. It’s more about the enjoyment and the sport. And if you’re having to labor that much, then the enjoyment goes away.”
Griffy says he printed the slugs with a Solidoodle 3 3-D printer — which retails for $800 — using ABS thermoplastic using dimensions from one of Heeszel’s non-printed slugs. Griffy then created the computer-aided design files, converted them to a stereolithography format, and checked the files for inconsistencies with the 3-D printing software Netfabb. He also designed slugs in three sizes. The largest slug takes about an hour to print. The others take about 30 minutes. He also added a lead ball to each slug to give them more weight. The final step was mailing them to Heeszel, who fitted the slugs into hollowed-out — non-printed — shotgun cartridges.

Watch 3-D Printed Shotgun Slugs Blow Away Their Targets [Robert Beckhusen/Wired]

The Man Who Laughs: grotesque Victor Hugo potboiler was the basis for The Joker

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:54:03 +0000

The Man Who Laughs is a graphic novel adaptation of a 1869 Victor Hugo novel that is chiefly remembered for inspiring a 1928 film whose poster-art, in turn, inspired the character of the Joker.

As legions of disappointed Batman fans have discovered, the Victor Hugo novel is just not very good. It's one of Hugo's later works, written from exile in the Channel Islands, and it's a meandering political treatise grafted onto a novel. But there is a novel in there, buried amongst the self-indulgence and sloppiness, and it's this that author David Hine and illustrator Mark Stafford have teased out to make an absolutely stunning and grotesque new work.

The titular Man of Laughs is Gwynplaine, a horribly deformed boy who rescues a blind baby from her frozen mother's breast and then rescued by a traveling doctor who takes them both in and turns them into performers. They tour the countryside, and Gwynplaine and his blind adopted sister Dea fall in love, even as their mountebank father, Ursus, teaches them about the injustices of the English monarchy and shows them the relationship between the dire poverty around them and the fatted lords and ladies in London.

Gwynplaine's destiny becomes further entangled with the English aristocracy when he is discovered to be a long-lost nobleman himself, and is inducted into the House of Lords, where he makes impassioned, revolutionary speeches that fall on deaf ears -- and is forced to confront that all the riches he's gained have cost him his family and his love.

This adaptation is remarkably streamlined and razor-sharp, flensed of Hugo's excess by Hine's pen; the accompanying grotesque illustrations by Stafford hit the perfect mix of horror and sorrow. The Man Who Laughs is out in the UK now, from the great press Self Made Hero, and will be out in the USA on Oct 1.

The Man Who Laughs

Empathy explained by David Foster Wallace

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 03:38:56 +0000

UPDATE: "Vimeo has removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust claiming that this material is infringing: THIS IS WATER - By David Foster Wallace."

Here's a beautifully made video accompaniment to "This is Water," an excerpt from a David Foster Wallace commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, in which Wallace exhorts his listeners to empathize with the people around them, using examples and languages so beautifully chosen that they just about break your heart.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 (via Lifehacker)

RIAA losing money, firing employees, giving execs raises

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 03:00:40 +0000

The RIAA has submitted its latest Form 990 tax filing to the IRS, which details the organization's precipitous shelving off in budget and employees (though the execs gave themselves fat raises):

The drop in income can be solely attributed to lower membership dues from the major music labels. Over the past two years label contributions have dropped to $23.6 million, and over a three-year period the labels cut back a total of $30 million, which is more than the RIAA’s total income today.
The cutbacks are not immediately apparent from the salaries paid to the top executives. RIAA Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman, for example, earned $1.46 million compared to $1.37 million the year before. Senior Executive Vice President Mitch Glazier also saw a modest rise in income from $618,946 to $642,591.
...The reduction in legal costs is even more significant, going from to $6.4 million to $1.2 million in two years. In part, this reduction was accomplished by no longer targeting individual file-sharers in copyright infringement lawsuits, which is a losing exercise for the group.
Looking through other income we see that the RIAA received $196,378 in “anti-piracy restitution,” coming from the damages awarded in lawsuits against Limewire and such.

RIAA Makes Drastic Employee Cuts as Revenue Plummets [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

Anatomical pinball table

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 01:44:20 +0000

Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier's guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University in Kingston. It's meant to demonstrate the way that repetition and concentration can inure you to the horrors of war:

The first part of his exhibition is a re-themed pinball machine, which now, having been Tsui-ed, is called Musketball! Tsui repainted the front glass panel and it now shows a British soldier reeling back as his guts explode from a musket shot (no rolling around inside for this one). The playing surface is painted with organs, tissue and bone, with the words “mangled viscera” at midfield. It would all be tame in a modern shooter video game, but it’s shockingly graphic on a vintage board.
I step up to the game and fire my first ball, which gets back in the gutter faster than I thought possible. I fire the second ball — which I note are gold, not silver, to which Tsui says, “I kind of blinged it up a little bit.” This ball stays in play just long enough to hit a few bumpers and set off sound effects of rifle shots and artillery blasts. I fire my remaining three balls, and my final score is slightly less than one-tenth of Tsui’s high score. “It’s your first time playing. I had to do a lot of testing,” Tsui says, showing he’s also talented in the art of diplomacy.
“After a while,” he says, “you sort of get hooked on the game, and the whole idea for me is that it distances the player from the idea of violence.”

Pinball, bones and animal skins: Howie Tsui’s wonderful horrors of the War of 1812 [Peter Simpson/Ottawa Citizen]

(via Kadrey)

Forging £1 coins is apparently profitable

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:36:22 +0000

Three men have been convicted of forging £1 coins. The London Police Detective Inspector even got all quippy about the sentencing ("These three men are organised criminals who were intent on undermining the UK monetary system. There is nothing fake about the reality they must now face of life behind bars." -- yes, yes, very clever DI South) but what fascinates me about the story is that it can somehow be profitable to forge £1 coins.

I got passed a fake pound shortly after I first moved to the UK, almost ten years go; it was a foil-wrapped plastic slug. Not realizing it was fake, I tried to buy something with it at a corner shop and the cashier pressed it edge-on on his counter and the foil split open, revealing the green plastic disc inside.

From the sound of this article, these fakes were solid metal, which, I think, would make them more expensive than the fake I got. When you add the costs of the materials, the wages for the manufacturing process, warehousing, the discount for counterfeit cash, etc, it's hard to believe that this was worth anyone's while.

On the other hand, it's probably easier to go on counterfeiting when you're passing very small denominations as most people (me included) won't bother going to the cops over a mere pound; and it's much harder to remember where a given pound coin came from than a £20 note.

The court heard Fisher, of Rags Lane in Goffs Oak, Hertfordshire, Sullivan, of Bancroft Chase in Hornchurch, east London, and Abbott were arrested during an undercover police operation in Essex last May.
Police found a storage container with 1.6 million metal discs inside and fake coins equivalent to £20,000.
Fake coins equivalent to a further £30,000 were found in a nearby car.

Three men jailed over 'largest' fake £1 coin plot [BBC]

(Image: Yet another forged pound coin, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from pahudson's photostream)

HOWTO move an immensely delicate 50'-wide circular electromagnet

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:24:59 +0000

Fermilab just got a new Awesome Magnet, a 50'-wide jobbie that can't be tilted by more than a few degrees without suffering irreparable harm. It's in New York, though, and Fermilab is outside of Chicago, and this presents a logistical problem with a complicated solution:

The Muon g-2 ring, an electromagnet made of steel and aluminum, begins its 3,200-mile trek from New York in early June. From there, it will sail by barge down the East Coast, around Florida's tip into the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Mississippi River until it arrives in Illinois.
Once on land, the electromagnet will be driven at night in a specially designed truck at no more than 10 mph until it reaches Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The high-tech transport is all in service of a plan to use Fermilab's powerful beam to send muons, a rare kind of particle that lasts just 2.2 millionths of a second, into the circular electromagnet, according to experiment spokesman Lee Roberts, who works at Fermilab. Once in the ring, muons "wobble," or tilt like a top.

Huge magnet set for delicate voyage to Fermilab [Alexa Aguilar/Chicago Tribune]

(via /.)

Promotional DVDs smell like pizza when played

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:08:13 +0000

A Brazilian ad agency has built a campaign for Domino's "Pizza" that uses a heat-sensitive coating on rented DVDs; when the disc is played, the heat from the player heats up the coating and causes it to emit a pizza-like odor; the coating also changes appearance and becomes a picture of a pizza with an ad for Domino's.

In partnership with 10 video rental stores in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the brand used rented DVDs as media. About 10 discs each of 10 different new release titles such as Argo, 007, Dread And Dark Knight were stamped with thermal ink and flavored varnish, both sensitive to the heat.
While people were watching the movie, the heat of the DVD player affected the disc. When the movie ended and they ejected the disc, they smelled pizza. They also saw pizza: the discs were printed to look like mini pies, and carried the message: "Did you enjoy the movie? The next one will be even better with a hot and delicious Domino's Pizza."

A DVD That Smells Like Domino's Pizza

Iain Banks doesn't write sf for the money

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 22:04:43 +0000

SF/thriller writer Iain Banks has weighed in to quash a rumor that he only wrote his amazing SF novels to pay the bills because the (also amazing) high-brow literary thrillers didn't bring in enough:

I wish I did have the time to reply to everybody individually but I don’t. I think I’ll only comment on any of the posts if there’s something factually wrong mentioned in them, and so far the only point I can remember is one where an ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round. And… rant over.

Banks is dying of cancer, and it's an awful shame.

20 May Update from Iain (via IO9)

Ice cream ad: "if you want nutrition, eat a carrot"

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:58:43 +0000

Wisconsin's Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream has some refreshingly honest ad-copy on the side of its vans. The photo was snapped by a Consumerist reader named David, and shows a van whose advert disclaims any nutritional merit, proudly proclaiming "gobs of rich Wisconsin cream" as well as lots of "real ingredients" (whatever those are). My own experience has been that eating food high in grass-fed animal fat is good for me, so that sounds about right to me -- though carrots are good, too!

Ice Cream Company Knows What You’re Here For: You Want Nutrition? Eat Carrots

Little girl in a Stan Lee costume

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:53:56 +0000

The bestest kid costume yet: tiny, female Stan Lee!

Little girl's cosplay of Stan Lee (i.imgur.com)

Geeky tornado relief fundraisers

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:30:45 +0000

Alan sez, "Two items here on the same theme: Ruben Bolling, comic author of Tom The Dancing Bug, contributor to JoCo Funnies, etc. has a raffle posted on his blog. If you donate to the American National Red Cross through a page he has set up, you will be entered into a drawing for a personal comic from Bolling; Greg Pak, creator of the 'Code Monkey Save World' visuals and co-conspirator in the recent Kickstarter with Jonathan Coulton is offering free CMSW stickers to people who make a donation to any recognized organization helping tornado victims."

Why UK government IT sucks so hard

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:30:44 +0000

Here's a very short and snappy explanation for why so much of the UK's government IT infrastructure is so fantastically, awfully bad: it's an RFP from a Northern Irish government business development fund for a "Content Management System to manage all Invest NI websites and intranets." Here's how they express their priorities:

IV.2.1)Award criteria
The most economically advantageous tender in terms of
1. Price. Weighting 95
2. Quality. Weighting 5

This is for a 523 000 GBP contract, by the way.

Invest NI wishes to appoint a suitably qualified service provider to install, configure, maintain and support a Content Management System to manage all Invest NI websites and intranets... (Thanks, Angie!)

Titanium ring whose jewels glow through induction

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:52:02 +0000

Ben Kokes wanted to give a ring to his sweetheart, and to make it interesting, he decided to create a ring with an inductive loop that would cause the stones to light up when they were close to a power-source. He documented the tricky technical problems that cropped up during the build, and it sounds like the romance part came out well, too:

The final idea was to embed a LED and copper coil assembly inside the titanium ring, illuminating it from under the stones when it was in close proximity to an induced alternating magnetic field (henceforth called 'the transmitter'). Autodesk Inventor helped me develop all of the dimensions and constraints for the design. Having some help, I was able to obtain her ring size and the rest of the measurements were based from there (15.72mm if anyone was wondering)...
... Of all the challenges presented in making the ring, affixing the stone is the most difficult. Traditionally, stones are affixed by mechanical means -- prongs, groves or snaps. Epoxies will delaminate from the attachment surfaces due to microstresses, thermal cycling, and other unmentioned movements. The stone may be attached now, but eventually it will fall out. It's just a matter of time.
With that in mind, I had 4 initial ideas for affixing the stone: thermally expanding the hole, hole deformation, point expansion deformation, and epoxy. Ultimately, I went with the epoxy method for attaching the stones.
The first test was to try and heat the ring, expand the hold and drop in the stone. When the hole cooled and contracted, it would hold the stone in place. Not only does the hole not expand enough, if I was lucky enough for it to happen (it did once), the stone would fracture along pre-existing crack lines.

Project Longhaul (via Hacker News)

3D latte foam art

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:43:52 +0000

Brian Ashcraft updates us on the astounding foam-art of Osaka barista Kazuki Yamamoto. Yamamoto has now mastered 3D foam, and is blowing my mind. Ashcraft has a series of posts documenting the journey of Yamamoto to undisputed novelty foam king of the Pacific Rim.

3D Coffee Art Reaches New, Dizzying Heights [Brian Ashcraft/Kotaku] (via Geekologie)

Why are Britons seeing large, muscular black cats?

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:43:59 +0000

Thousands of Britons have reported seeing "beasts" in various places, usually described as a large, muscular black cat -- possibly a melanistic leopard. Some have taken photos and found footprints, as well as animals torn apart on moors. However, the boring science people annoyingly keep pointing out that the photos could be housecats, the footprints come from housecats and domestic dogs, and the animals were torn apart by badgers and crows.

Still, there's something weird and interesting going on here -- the thousands of similar eyewitness reports point to a kind of "beast fever" fuelled by (what else?) the Daily Mail's printing of stories that, for example, described a beast with "great fangs jutted from its huge jaw, gleaming in the afternoon sun" (it was revealed to be a "putrefying seal").

George Monbiot writes about this in his new book Feral, which comes out next week and was excerpted in today's Guardian:

The age of terrestrial exploration and encounters with peoples unknown to us was ending; planet Earth was perhaps a less exciting place than it had been. Aliens and their craft filled a gap, while promising that we too would achieve the mastery of technology we ascribed to extraterrestrials. Today, perhaps because our belief in technological deliverance has declined, we hear less about UFOs.
Could it be that illusory big cats also answer an unmet need? As our lives have become tamer and more predictable, as the abundance and diversity of nature has declined, could these imaginary creatures have brought us something we miss?
Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken vestigial evolutionary memories of conflict and survival, memories that must incorporate encounters – possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors faced – with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind.

Big-cat sightings: is Britain suffering from mass hysteria? [George Monbiot/The Guardian]

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