Geeky tornado relief fundraisers —

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." — Cory •

Seecrypt costs $3 a month and allows subscribers to make encrypted phone calls to each other. It promises a "100% protected network through encryption between two callers anywhere in the world." Sounds interesting and useful for keeping government snoops away. However, the press release issued today tells a somewhat different story:

“Seecrypt will pro-actively assist law enforcement agencies to prevent criminal activity being carried out using this encryption service. Our technology is designed to restore privacy rights for legitimate usage," stated Seecrypt CEO Mornay Walters. “Seecrypt's Privacy Network has been designed so that it can terminate access rights immediately for any individual identified by law enforcement or other governmental authorities as suspected of improper use.”

Does that mean that if someone is using Seecrypt and the government starts investigating them the service simply shuts off? If so, it's a great way for criminals to learn that they are under investigation.

Or does it mean that Seecrypt will let the suspect make calls without letting them know that the encryption has been disabled?

Or, does it mean Seecrypt will do something else that I can't think of? I emailed SeeCrypt to find out and will share my answer when I get it.

More from the press release:

Seecrypt advisor and former assistant director, U.S. Secret Service, Anthony Chapa added, “Seecrypt’s impressive technology provides a new level of protection to company executives and individual citizen’s privacy rights, while not compromising international and U.S. investigative efforts surrounding serious criminal activity. There are techniques that law enforcement and intelligence organizations have available, and with the help of Seecrypt would not impede their mission.”

Given the Obama administration's alarming record of surveillance, I think any investigative journalists thinking of using this service should make sure they really are "100% protected."

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)

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)

Nikola Tesla pitches some Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Perfect. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

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]

(Image: 20120413, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from tomascosauce's photostream)

This excerpt from neurologist-philosopher Daniel Dennett's new book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking lays out a set of rhetorical habits that I immediately aspired to attain:

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

And if that wasn't enough: "whenever you see a rhetorical question, try – silently, to yourself – to give it an unobvious answer. If you find a good one, surprise your interlocutor by answering the question." And then, "A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don't waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone."

Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking (via O'Reilly Radar)

Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal is the shocking, insane, brutal, and fascinating story of heavy metal music told by those who lived it, from Black Sabbath (above), Anthrax, and Slayer, to Megadeth, Metallica, and Iron Maiden. Here's a taste:

ROGER MIRET (Agnostic Front): In the mid-'80s, there wasn't much difference between metal and hardcore scenes. Everyone dressed in black, everyone was walking out of step with society, because whether you were a punk rocker, a skinhead, a hardcore kid, or a metal dude, you didn't fit in. You were a weirdo, and nobody's mother wanted their kids hanging out with you.

PETER STEELE: (Type O Negative, Carnivore): [Carnivore's second album, 1987's] Retaliation was extremely influenced by my discovery of hardcore music at CBGB in '85 and '86. What I strived to do was create an album that was half Black Sabbath and half Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front, Murphy's Law, Sheer Terror, Black Flag, stuff like that. I loved the heaviness, the slowness, the dirge of Sabbath. But at the same time, going to CBGB on Sundays for the matinee, there was so much unbelievable energy in there. It didn't even matter if bands were not in tune.

MIRET: All these bands like Anthrax and Metallica would come and see us at CBGB. It was like the welcoming home of all these bands, and I think meeting each other and seeing each other's bands really cemented the crossover scene...

SCOTT IAN (Anthrax, S.O.D.): I used to go to the CBGB hardcore matinees and that got me totally into Agnostic Front, C.O.C., and D.R.I. You'd have all these hardcore and metal kids coming together to see these bands and there were definitely fights, but at the same time you felt this sense of community.

HARLEY FLANAGAN (Cro-Mags): If it were not for Venom and Motörhead, the Cro-Mags would not have sounded the way we did. I was hanging out with violent skinheads with crazy pentagrams and swastikas tattooed all over them, listening to Venom and Discharge, huffing glue, trying to invoke demons.

Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (Amazon)

The Oral History of NYC's Metal/Hardcore Crossover (book excerpt in the Village Voice)

A mechanical engineer (awesomely) named Anjan Contractor has won a NASA grant to prototype a 3D printer for food -- specifically pizza. It will lay down layers of food and flavor powder and melt them together; the powders are room-temperature stable for long periods and can be made from relatively abundant, sustainable foodstocks like insects and soylent green. He prototyped the concept with the 3D chocolate printer in the video above, and he holds out hope that food-printing could solve world hunger by allowing billions to feast on low-wastage, low-energy-input, low-carbon-footprint foods that are printed to order.

Contractor's printer is RepRap based, and is open source hardware; he promises to keep the plans open and free.

I suspect that there's a lot of nutritional subtleties lost when you turn food into processed elements that are recombined (in the same way that beta-carotene in carrots is reliably shown to have health benefits, while beta-carotene supplements are far more questionable). But as a form of food processing, it certainly is exciting!

Pizza is an obvious candidate for 3D printing because it can be printed in distinct layers, so it only requires the print head to extrude one substance at a time. Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks. It works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same time it’s printed, by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form, and then mixed with water and oil,” says Contractor.

Finally, the pizza is topped with the delicious-sounding “protein layer,” which could come from any source, including animals, milk or plants.

The audacious plan to end hunger with 3-D printed food (Thanks to everyone who sent this in!)

House of Mirth asked dedicated vernacular photo collectors to share their favorite vintage snapshots with an insect theme. Above is Robert Jackson's pick. Right is a snap from Pat Street's archives. "Bugs - They fly, bite and pester & sometimes people take photos of them"

I think one of the most fascinating uses of augmented reality is to reveal the "secret histories" of neighborhoods, buildings, and other locations when you are actually in those spaces. Jewish Time Jump: New York is a new mobile AR game meant to teach young people about New York City's rich cultural history of Jewish immigration and the women's and labor movements of the early 20th century. Jewish Time Jump was created by ConverJent, a nonprofit focused on Jewish learning games, with a grant from the Covenant Foundation, a Jewish education group. I haven't played Jewish Time Jump yet but it is a finalist in the 2013 Games for Change Awards for "Most Innovative." From The Jewish Week:

In a 21st-century twist on the scavenger hunt, players find the requisite clues by physically moving to locations inside and across the street from (Washington Square Park), which is adjacent to the building that once housed the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. (Today it, like most of the buildings surrounding the park, is part of New York University.) As players move from location to location, archival photos, events and characters appear on their mobile devices, triggered by GPS technology. Students also view historical documents — such as old Yiddish newspaper pages (with translations) and flyers — on their mobile devices as they play…

Asked why he chose an episode of labor history — the game deals with the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, also known as the Uprising of the 20,000 — as opposed to another Jewish topic, (ConverJent founder Rabbi Owen Gottlieb) said that immigrant history is “already a part of many schools’ curricula” and that he liked how this topic incorporated women’s history and provided “fascinating conflict.”

Jewish Time Jump: New York

"Touch-Screen Time Travel In The Park" (The Jewish Week)