Screenwriter/show-runner John Rogers has had it with the right-wing myth that Hollywood keeps making anti-war movies that flop, proving how out of touch the Liberal Elite are with the will of the peeepul. So he's written a masterful takedown of this notion, looking at every war-related film in 2007/8 and calculating how profitable they were. Conclusion: Hollywood makes a modest number of films with anti-war messages, and most of them make a decent amount of money. Then he goes on to offer a compelling account of the process by which potentially risky "message" films get made by big, bottom-line oriented studios.

The whole thing was prompted by a comment by John "Dirty Harry" Nolte, whose site offers this epithet to describe himself: "[a] right-wing, Tim Robbins-loathing blogger."Nolte posted, "Between narratives and documentaries I’ve counted 16 anti-Iraq war films over the last two years. All have flopped, miserably. More are on the way." As Rogers demonstrates, this is just not true, as a purely factual matter.

1.) Body of Lies (2.714 theaters) -- Actually the point of the column in question. Definitely War on Terror oriented. And as noted in the column cited, not profitable at only $39 million against a production budget of $70 million -- oh I'm sorry, what? We're using worldwide box office? Okay, not my idea, but okay. In that case, Body of Lies made $108 million against $70 million production, plainly in the black, even before after-market sales. That's right, the movie they use as an example of a flop on Day One of their shiny new website actually made money according to their own standards. Way to bring the rain, boys. In profit.

Big Hollywood and Why I Admire David Zucker

Instructables member Antibromide modded a "Vintage Edition" Monopoly set into an electrified steampunk version, wherein your pieces' movement around the board trigger electrical effects in four props in the center. Brava!

I started with a special edition Monopoly board and added a Community Chest, a water tower (for the water company), a Ray Gun (for the Chance cards), a train (for the railroads), and street lights (for the electric company). I used reed switches and magnets for the triggers when you land on designated spots on the board.

Electrified Monopoly - Steampunk Inspired (Thanks, Yehuda!)

I've just finished watching the video of Bre Pettis's riveting presentation on Rapid Prototyping at 25C3, the annual Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin. Pettis is one of my favorite makers in the world, and this presentation covers every aspect of rapid prototyping, desktop fabbing, 3D printing (and whatever else you want to call it). From the technology underpinning it to the history of the form to the practicalities of clubbing together to buy expensive machinery to the philosophy, economics and emotional satisfaction of decentralized making, Pettis runs the whole gamut, with humor, humility, and a thoroughgoing knowledge of the subject. From automated knitting machines that go from "I'm cold" to "I have a scarf" in fifteen minutes to sugar-based 3D printers to papercraft CAD to laser cutters and robotic Dremel tools, Pettis paints a picture of a future where something can go from your head to the real world with the fluidity of a blog post.

Prototype Your Life MP4, 437MB, Prototype Your Life MP4, 437MB (Coral Cache mirror) (via Bre Pettis)

Salon's got a good, meaty, heavily linked and referenced roundup of the damage done to the US economy and body politic during the Bush administrations:

How much poorer are we going to get before we start getting richer again? Here are some (scary, morbid, gruesome) clues.

Expected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal growth path in 2009: $900 billion

Decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its decade high to its value at the close of business, Jan. 7, 2009: 5,394.83, or 38.1 percent

Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million

Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to 2008: 4 million, a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate

Real median household income according to the 2000 census, adjusted for inflation: $51,804

Real median household income as of August 2007: $50,233

Of course, the government didn't sit idly by while our financial future was disappearing down the drain. Instead, the feds have pumped in hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hoping to juice lending and public spending.

Cost of finance industry bailout: $350 billion, with another $350 pending congressional approval

Cost of auto industry bailout: $17.4 billion, so far

And even though there's widespread agreement among economists that the government needs to be spending a large sum of money on an economic stimulus package, it still won't look pretty on the public balance sheet.

National debt: $10.6 trillion

Amount of that debt owned by China: At least $800 billion

W. and the damage done

Lisa Jones's Symbiosis chairs start to get at the potential of cheap and ubiquitous laser-cutters -- the backs are and seats cut with highly intricate designs inspired by human anatomy. Shown here, the Venus Chair from 2006.

Lisa Jones: Symbiosis Chair Series, 2006 Lisa Jones: Symbiosis Chair Series, 2007 (via Cribcandy)

Marvel at the spread of a botnet around the world in this 44-second time-lapse covering five days' infection activity, as measured by observing new joins to a botmaster's IRC channel. It's really fascinating how geographical our Internet activity really is -- how a bot's jump to another region (seemingly) precipitates more local infections as (presumably) local users communicate with nearby systems.

Flashy Botnet is Flashy (via O'Reilly Radar)

Here's a mashup that'll put a smile on your dial: Party Ben's Single Ladies (In Mayberry) (Beyoncé vs. "The Andy Griffith Show" Theme) is just the thing to start the day right with a vision of little Ronnie Howard and Beyonce leading a parade down Mayberry's main street to Aunt Bea's house for tea and cakes. It's part of the latest installment in the annual Best of Bootie series, which includes 33 tracks in total this year.

Party Ben - Single Ladies (In Mayberry) (Beyoncé vs. "The Andy Griffith Show" Theme), Party Ben - Single Ladies (In Mayberry) (Beyoncé vs. "The Andy Griffith Show" Theme) (Coral cache mirror), (Thanks, Adrian & Mysterious D of Bootie!)

Collin Cunningham of the MAKE blog put together a wonderful video about the history of LEDs, along with a demonstration on making a primitive LED out of silicone carbide.

This week, the Boing Boing Gadgets crew are embedded at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Alas, I am not. So I experience their joy, sadness, wonder, and cynicism via insightful, entertaining, dramatic, and action-packed blog posts about new laptops, gaming gear, TVs, digicams, wristradios, and, er, washing machines. Boing Boing Gadgets at CES

Extraordinary sculptor Jessica Joslin will premiere her new work at Billy Shire Fine Arts in Los Angeles this Saturday.

Show here: Gustav. 19"x9"x16". Antique brass findings and hardware, bone, velvet, satin, embroidered glove leather, antique steel tricycle, glass eyes. $7500.

Jessica Joslin exhibition in LA on Saturday, January 10th, 7-10 pm

Youth Radio is a terrific youth media organization that teaches journalism, production, and tech to underserved young people aged 14-24. I hang out at their Oakland studio some and always have a great time. The kids are very bright, curious, passionate, and really funny. And they crank out great content for National Public Radio, local stations, and of course streaming online. Recently, we were talking about how the media can help bring science to life by conveying how wonderful and weird the natural and engineered world can be. So we came up with Brains & Beakers, a series where I bring in a scientist or engineer to hang out at Youth Radio for a couple hours doing demos, presenting, and answering questions. The students document the whole thing and produce media from it.

For the first Brains & Beakers, my friend Tom Zimmerman was kind enough to join us. Tom is a research scientist at IBM Almaden who is probably best known as the inventor of the Nintendo Powerglove. (I profiled Tom in MAKE Vol. 4) These days, Tom's still an avid maker who builds things like electronic drum kits from plumbing parts, cheap microscopes for backyard biology, and a slew of other fun projects. Tom had a blast at Youth Radio, jamming on his PVC drum kit with the students and exploding a plastic bottle filled with hydrogen. Check out Youth Radio for video and audio from the evening. As their t-shirt says, "I hecka love Youth Radio." "Brains and Beakers: Inventors and Explosions!" (Thanks, Lissa Soep and Erik Sakamoto!)

Erin Wilk says:

I love this video of Zoe (ukulelezo) singing a song about moustaches that she wrote for the Bushman Ukelele Contest. It perfectly sums up my feelings about moustaches - If you've got a moustache - I like you. Her latest video, Celebrity Identity Crisis is pretty sweet too - and her ukulele rendition of Nelly's Hot in Herre and the Spice Girl's Wannabe made me laugh out loud.

Chris sez, "Perhaps inspired by the Spore DRM debacle of last year, the FTC is going to hold a Town Hall Meeting on the subject of Digital Rights Management (DRM) in March. They are soliciting requests and suggestions for discussion from the general public via a contact form or e-mail through January 30th. This is a great chance to make your viewpoints heard!"

Man, I wish I could be at this thing!

Digital rights management (DRM) refers to technologies typically used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, and copyright holders to attempt to control how consumers access and use media and entertainment content. Among other issues, the workshop will address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations. Interested parties may submit written comments or original research on this topic.

FTC Town Hall to Address Digital Rights Management Technologies - Event Takes Place Wednesday, March 25, 2009, in Seattle (Thanks, Chris!)

John Cartan says:

The U.S. Department of Defense has a $2.3 billion program, Small Business Innovation Research, that comes up with projects to fund. Idea OSD09-H03? Develop an AI that fools young children into thinking they are talking to Daddy or Mommy when Daddy or Mommy are off on their 3rd deployment to Iraq and can't come to the webcam.

"The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying "I love you", or "I miss you", or "Good night mommy/daddy." ... The application should incorporate an AI that allows for flexibility in language comprehension to give the illusion of a natural (but simple) interaction."

The solicitation includes a hefty shopping cart of "boys with toys" action: Voice-recognition and voice-interaction are required along with "Advanced” Multi-media simulation using video footage or high-resolution 3-D rendering.

Not covered: counseling fees after Timmy finds out he's been saying "I love you, Dad" to a robot.

DOD Wants parent bots to fool tots

(Flash video above, downloadable MP4 is here.)

Greetings from the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Lost Wages, Nevada! I'm here with the Boing Boing Gadgets fellas -- Beschizza, Brownlee, and Johnson, and Boing Boing's video team. We're traveling the floor with the BBG 3, surveilling all they review, and we'll be filing daily reports from the floor. Here is the first.

Highlights from this episode:

* So you've probably heard there's an "Official Blog of CES," right? So, screw those guys, we're more awesome. In this episode, Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (the group that puts on CES) dubs Joel Johnson the Official King of CES, then bows down to him and touches Joel's invizibul robe.

* Rob Beschizza shows us what he likes about the new netbooks from Asus, namely the screens you can swivel around to use as touch-sensitive tablets (disclaimer: Asus is sponsoring BB Video's presence at CES, but not BB Gadgets. Rob actually didn't know anything about it at the time, so this isn't paid placement or editorial whoring).

* Joel grills the everliving crap out of the poor guy tasked with representing Sharper Image here. Joel was a big fan of the early incarnation of the mega-gadgets chain store, but believes they went to hell before they were recently bought out and resurrected. Joel's advice to the new guy: don't speak to us in marketingese, please, and stop making crappy products.

* Joel talks with the guys at WowWee about a Spyball for children -- baby's first panopticon! $150 device, shaped like a play ball, includes cameras to spy on other playmates. WTF.

* Xeni snuggles with robotic stuffed animals from WowWee that respond to human touch with emotive facial expressions, grunts, growls, and body movements. Verdict: cute, also creepy, definitely from the Uncanny Valley.

* Beschizza and Joel perform the first of what will likely be many schwag booze taste tests. Today: whiskey from the hosted bar, plus tiny energy drinks some wireless networking company was giving out. Mix them together, and you get what Joel describes as "there's nothing not awful about this it's just plain bad."

Next episode: we are accosted in the dark of night, on the streets of Vegas, by inebriated Canadian chemical engineers dressed as Yeti Furries.

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Join the discussion thread for this episode over at Boing Boing Gadgets.

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Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing's video coverage of CES 2009 is sponsored by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is intended to be a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

The people at the online streaming video content site Fancast invited me to write some movie and tv reviews for Fancast.com, and I've been submitting them in recent weeks (disclaimer: I'm being paid to do so, but I actually do dig the content there -- lots of weird stuff, and they're not editing my reviews or controlling editorial content at all). I think this will be my final post for a while, but I do hope you'll read, then watch, and enjoy. It's about one of the crappiest sci-fi/horror flicks ever made, THE FOOD OF THE GODS. Snip:

I don’t know who convinced a Hollywood executive to greenlight this turkey in the mid-seventies, but studio guy, if I ever find you I’ll kiss you. I first saw “Food” at a cult-movie screening club in Los Angeles — part of a film series they called “When Animals Attack.” Hitchcock’s “The Birds would have belonged in the series, but it’s just not crappy enough. The movies that did make the cut? “Bug,” about killer cockroaches (1975), “Day of the Animals,” about killer dogs (1978) and the ROFL-riffic “Night of the Lepus,” about killer bunnies (1972). Yeah, that’s right. I said killer bunnies.

While the other films focus on specific species of critterdom, “Food of the Gods” was a veritable smorgasbord of malicious mammals, foul fowl, and bad bugs. Cringe as the supersized chicken chomps on townspeople! Gasp when huge rats and wasps dine on helpless humans!

Ecology Strikes Back: "The Food of the Gods" (Fancast.com, comment thread is over there!)

Based on satellite observations, the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center reports that the amount of sea ice on the planet is the highest in 29 years, when satellite record-keeping began.

Earlier this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery. Bill Chapman, a researcher with the UIUC's Arctic Center, tells DailyTech this was due in part to colder temperatures in the region. Chapman says wind patterns have also been weaker this year. Strong winds can slow ice formation as well as forcing ice into warmer waters where it will melt.

Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979

Suw sez,

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Over 300 people have already signed a pledge to publish a blog post, video blog or podcast episode about a woman they admire on 24th March 2009. We need 700 more people for the pledge to be successful.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. But in the tech world women's contributions often go unacknowledged and role models are hard to find. Ada Lovelace Day is a chance for us to sing the praises of the women who make tech tick: entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants... The list of tech-related careers is almost endless and we want to see examples from all of them!

Ada Lovelace Day (Thanks, Suw!)

Trailer for the 1968 movie Psych-Out, starring Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Susan Strasberg, and Dean Stockwell.

From Wikipedia, which has a thorough plot synopsis:

Psych-Out is a 1968 feature film about hippies, psychedelic music, and recreational drugs, produced and released by American International Pictures. Originally scripted as The Love Children, the title when tested caused people to think it was about bastards, so Samuel Z. Arkoff came up with the ultimate title based on a recent successful reissue of Psycho.

(via PCL Linkdump)

The Independent Games Festival announced its finalists for the awards recognizing the best games you've never heard of (or at least I've never heard of). Brandon has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld. I can't wait to check out Q-Games's PixelJunk Eden which made the list for visual art, technical, and audio excellence. "Pixeljunk Eden, Osmos top 2009 IGF nominations"

Interesting documentary about a couple of Chicagoans who find and eat edible weeds, wild berries, nettles, purslane, apples, and other goodies free for the taking in the urban landscape.

Urban foragers are people who eat what grows naturally from a very unnatural place— a city. In this all-vegetarian Sky Full of Bacon podcast, urban foragers show us how they find food all around them. Chef-blogger Art Jackson shows us what's growing around his home in Pilsen, and then foraging expert Nance Klehm, Art and I nibble our way through a remarkable wilderness literally in the shadow of Chicago's skyscrapers.

(Via Homegrown Evolution)

The latest Stephen Fry podcast, "Language," is an outstanding rant on the absurdity of being a pedant about the English language, that most glorious, reeling drunken bastard of a tongue that has neither academy nor dictator to rule on "correctness" and so has blossomed into a million variegated subforms in every corner of the globe. Fry excoriates people who insist on "correctness" in language, and urges us all to speak in ways that entertain and please us, rather than adhering to some rigid, notional code (among other things, he has withering contempt for people who complain about the verbing of nouns, pointing out Shakespeare's proclivity for same, and the prevalence of verbed nouns such as "propositioning" in our everyday speech).

On the way, Fry damns the idea of traditionalism itself -- and celebrates change, evolution, playfulness and the democratizing of the tongue. Every word of this is well-spoken, well-thought-out and absolutely liberating. What a treat.

Series 2 Episode 3, Language

Instructables is holding a contest where the most amazing HOWTO, as selected by the readers, will win $20,000 worth of Craftsman tools. That's a lot of hardware. There are nearly 200 entries, from a car that runs on trash to an LED hula hoop to a six-legged robot. Honestly, all of the projects are amazing for different reasons. My vote goes to The Golden Mean, Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate's dreamy snail car that we've featured here before and I covered in MAKE (Vol. 16). Instructables $20k contest

Hypostylin uploaded a few photos of a fabulous sign in a Burkina Faso pharmacy. Most of the people in the poster are suffering from horrible conditions, but the illustration for kankankan (NSFW) depicts a happy gentleman proudly displaying his newfound virility to all the world. (If you want to be as happy as he is, visit the Earth Center Store.)

In the LA Times' technology blog, Alex Pham writes about the Cobra XRS 9960G radar and laser detector, which can detect red light cameras and speed cameras.

The Chicago company does this by maintaining a database of intersections known to have red-light cameras and stretches of road with speeding cameras. The database currently has more than 5,000 intersections, speed camera locations and popular speed traps. But it's being updated twice a day by Cobra employees who are tasked with finding and verifying new locations by calling various cities, police departments and local businesses near major intersections. Due out in the spring, the detectors are priced from $389 to $439, depending on the model.

A radar detector that also alerts drivers to red-light and speed cameras

Lollyphile, makers of unusual suckers, offers absinthe lollipops. They're around $2 each. No information on the thujone content, if any.
Absinthe Lollipops (thanks, Eric Paulos!)

Some Nigerian motorcyclists are attempting to get around a new helmet law by wearing dried pumpkins shells on their heads. The shells, called calabashes, are commonly used as vessels for liquid. So far, 50 motorcycles have been impounded in the city of Kano after their riders were caught wearing pumpkin helmets. From the BBC News:

Kano Federal Road Safety Commission commander Yusuf Garba told the BBC they were taking a hard line with people found using the improvised helmets.

"We are impounding their bikes and want to take them to court so they can explain why they think wearing a calabash is good enough for their safety," he said.

Nigeria bikers' vegetable helmets (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

The American Gallery of Juror Art features doodles done by bored jurors. Above is a sketch by my friend Jonathan Koshi, an avid bicyclist who was clearly dreaming of doing something other than his civic duty. American Gallery of Juror Art

I enjoyed this short video profile of Ted Johnson, an artist who makes delightful kinetic sculptures from simple materials. (The acorn vibrobots at 2:25 are terrific!) (via Jake von Slatt)