Keyboard made from beer-cans

Here's a cute way to gimmick a keyboard out of a grid of beercans, using Raspberry Pis and Arduinos:

We did this at Webstock, event which took place in Bucharest in September. Staropramen, one of the sponsors of the event asked us for an innovative way to offer a trip to Prague to one of the event's guests.
So, we came up with a keyboard made out of 44 Staropramen beer cans. Each beer can was a key, and whenever someone touched it, the corresponding letter appeared on a large plasma screen (just like any regular computer keyboard).
And the surprise was fantastic! The user experience and engagement overcame any expectation. Every single person who attended Webstock tried the keyboard and participated to the contest.
Behind the scene, the system is built around an Arduino board and a few capacitive controllers (just like the ones which are inside smartphones' touch screens), connected to a Raspberry PI board which controls the plasma screen display.

The Beer Cans Keyboard Movie (via Hacker News)

A horse is a vehicle, in Kentucky, if you're drunk

Cory Doctorow at 7:51 pm • •

Kentucky cops will write you a DUI if you ride a horse drunk. The fellow whose circumstances proved this to the rest of us was carrying a jar of "moonshine" at the time. Lowering the Bar has some legal analysis of the bust. Good thing the horse was sober when he got pulled over, or there would have been an additional count of cruelty to animals.

And things are not looking good for him otherwise. The statutory language is better than the title: "No person under the influence of intoxicating beverages or any substance which may impair one's driving ability shall operate a vehicle that is not a motor vehicle anywhere in this state." Okay, but what is a "vehicle not a motor vehicle"? I think a skateboard or scooter would qualify, or even a Big Wheel. The Flintstones car would count. Surely someone in Kentucky has one of those. But can a living thing be a "vehicle"? Yes, people ride around on them, but to me the common meaning of "vehicle" just doesn't include a horse (elephant, lion, Sasquatch, whatever). A vehicle is a machine.
There is some support for this elsewhere in the statutes. The one above refers to "driving" ability. "Driving" is not the same as "riding" when it comes to animals, according to television. You would "ride" a horse during a cattle "drive," for example; you don't "drive" a horse. And look over here at Section 189.310, "Vehicles meeting other vehicles and animals," which not only distinguishes between "vehicles" and "animals" but also makes the riding/driving distinction. That seems unnecessary if every animal you could ride is also a vehicle, doesn't it?
All very interesting, said no one, but aren't there often statutes that define certain legal terms? Yes, and there's one here. And sadly for Rooster Cogburn, it defines "vehicle" as including "All agencies for the transportation of persons or property over or upon the public highways of the Commonwealth.…" So while I still like my "animal is not a vehicle" argument, Kentucky has precluded it.

Don't Ride Drunk in Kentucky

(Image: Defeat the devil drink - white horse, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from lydiashiningbrightly's photostream)

Drugs: Without the Hot Air, now in the USA!

Cory Doctorow at 6:28 am • •

I wrote last June about Drugs: Without the Hot Air, the best book on drug policy I've read, written by David Nutt, the UK drug czar who was fired because he refused to bow to political pressure to repudiate his own research on the relative harms from illegal drugs and legal activities. Nutt's book has now been published in the USA. As I said in June, this is a book that everyone should read. From my review:

Like the other writers in the series, Nutt is both committed to rigorous, evidence-based policy and to clear, no-nonsense prose that makes complex subjects comprehensible. He begins and ends the book with a look at the irrationality of our present drug policy, recounting a call he had with then-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who was furious that he'd compared horseback riding harms to the harms from taking MDMA. Smith says that "you can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal activity." When Nutt asks why not, she says, "because one is illegal." When he asks why it is illegal, she says, "Because it is harmful." So he asks, "Don't we need to compare harms to determine if it should be illegal?" And Smith reiterates, "you can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal activity." Lather, rinse, repeat, and you'll get our current drugs-policy disaster.
Nutt has been talking about harm reduction and evidence-based policy for drugs policy for years, and he often frames the question by pointing out that alcohol is a terrible killer of addicts and the people around them, and a disaster for society. But if he was to synthesize a drug that produced an identical high to alcohol, without producing any of the harms, it would almost certainly be banned and those involved in producing, selling and taking it would be criminalised. We ban drugs because they are harmful and we know they are harmful because they are banned. Drugs that we don't ban -- tobacco, alcohol -- are "harmful" too, but not in the same way as the drugs that are banned, and we can tell that they are different because they haven't been banned.
Nutt has choice words for the alcohol and tobacco industries, who often frame their activity as being supported by responsible choice, and claim that they only want to promote that sort of responsibility. But as Nutt points out, if Britain's drinkers hewed to the recommended drinking levels, total industry revenue would fall by 40% -- and the industry has shown no willingness to regulate super-cheap, high-alcohol booze, nor alcopops aimed at (and advertised to) children and teenagers.
Nutt compares the alcohol industry's self-regulated responsible drinking campaigns to a campaign that exposed students in East Sussex to factual information about the industry's corruption of public health messages, its ferocious lobbying efforts, and the cost of drinking to wider society. It turns out that exposing alcohol industry sleaze is vastly more effective at discouraging student drinking than anything sponsored by the industry itself.
From his discussion of legal drugs, Nutt moves on to factual accounts of the impact of illegal/controlled drugs, from "legal highs" like "meow meow" to opiods to cocaine to prescription painkillers and steroids to psychedelics. Each chapter is a bracing, brisk, no-nonsense inventory of what harms and benefits arise from each substance, the history of their regulation, and the ways in which changes to the means of taking the drugs changes the outcome. Laid out like this, it's easy to see that prohibition isn't ever the right answer -- not for science, not for society, not for justice, and not for health.
There's also a sense of the awful, tragic loss to society arising from the criminalization of promising drugs. A chapter called "Should Scientists Take LSD?" surveys the literature preceding the evidence-free banning of LSD, and the astounding therapeutic benefits hinted at in the literature.
The book closes with the War on Drugs, and the worlds' governments own frank assessments of the unmitigated disaster created by Richard Nixon's idiotic decision 40 years ago. Nutt analyzes the fact that policymakers know that the War on Drugs is worse than the drugs themselves (by a long shot), but are politically incapable of doing anything about it, not least because politicians on all sides stand poised to condemn their opponents for being "soft on drugs."

Drugs: Without the Hot Air

HOWTO make a cocktail that looks like outer space

Cory Doctorow at 12:00 pm • •

Given a black light, some tonic, some gin or vodka, and pink lemonade concentrate, you can mix a cocktail that looks like the aurora borealis:

Aurora is TCCs black light phosphorescent take on jungle-juice. Originally conceived in 2006, it is a drink that is pink in natural light, but glows aqua-marine in black-light. Thus, it represents the two main colors of the aurora-borealis. So, without further ado here is the recipe. (Originally, the drink was made with just pink-lemonade, but was later modified to use Rose’s Mojito Passion).

Aurora Jungle-Juice (Thanks, Matthew!)

Stick-up kid foiled by beer-throwing store manager

Cory Doctorow at 1:55 pm • •

An English stick-up artist was foiled in his attempt to rob a cornershop by a manager who flung 12-packs of lager at the crim until he fled the premises. There's an important RPG lesson here about the shortcomings of melee weapons when your adversary has a ranged weapon.

Don't Bring a Knife to a Beer Fight

Jack Daniel's has a very nice trademark lawyer

Cory Doctorow at 7:23 am • •

Patrick Wensink has posted a very nice and friendly cease-and-desist letter from Christy Susman, a Jack Daniel's company's trademark lawyer, who were concerned about the cover on his book Broken Piano for President. The JD lawyers offered to help pay for a new print run.

The Whiskey Rebellion. (Thanks, Leah!)

Creative Commons music contest: Freedom & Free Beer

Cory Doctorow at 5:17 pm • •

Christian sez,

2012's Free! Music! Contest has opened it's gates at july first. It is the fourth time, that this event is being organized by Musikpiraten, a german society that promotes free art and espacially free music. Bands from all over the world participate in it to win a publication on CD, the so called "Free! Music! Sampler" and prizes worth more than 1.000 Euros.
This year's motto "Freedom and Free Beer" reflects the very basic choice, every artist has to challenge: Shall my art be "free" as in "freedom" or "free" as in "free beer"? So unlike last year, where only cc-by and cc-by-sa licenses where allowed, this year music licensed under and creative commons license can be submitted.
The contest is officially supported by Creative Commons and the remixing portal ccMixter. The latter even announced a project featuring the contest, titled "Free Music & Free Beer. Background is, that Musikpiraten e.V., the foundation behind the contest, is being sued by the german royalty collection society GEMA for having published a creative commons licensed song last year without unrevealing the civil name of the artists. GEMA claims, they cannot verify that the artists are really allowed to publish their songs for free in the internet.

Freedom & Free Beer - der Free! Music! Contest 2012 (Thanks, Christian!)

Maggie at CONvergence, Twin Cities, July 6-7 —

Every year, CONvergence draws upwards of 5,000 people to the Minneapolis/St.Paul area for a celebrations of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and general geekery. This year, I'll be one of them. I'm participating in several of the Con's science and skepticism-themed panels. On July 6th, you can catch me at 3:30 pm, talking about facts, controversy, and climate change; and at 8:30 pm, I'll be on a panel about the physiology of drugs and alcohol. July 7th at 12:30 pm, I'll be on a panel about climate change denialism in the classroom. At 2:00 pm that same day, I'll be talking about women in science and technology. There will also be a chance on Friday to buy a copy of Before the Lights Go Out, my book on electric infrastructure and the future of energy, and/or get your copy signed by me. Hope to see you there! — Maggie •

LN2-frozen cocktail popsicles -- the cocksicle!

Cory Doctorow at 5:18 pm • •

Karen sez, "Instructables user kazmataz has figured out how to freeze alcohol using liquid nitrogen, and made her own cocktail popsicles."

CAREFULLY pour your liquid nitrogen into the container, making sure to not hit the top of your pops. You want enough LN2 to go about halfway up your pop molds.
While that's continuing to bubble away, pour some more LN2 into your smaller container. Delicately pour a little bit on top of your popsicles. It will all evaporate away, so don't worry about consuming any - this is just to ensure things freeze evenly from all sides.
Let the whole thing sit for a few minutes, or until the popsicle sticks seem firmly in place.
**pro-tip: besides just sitting there, and watching the popsicles slowly freeze (booooooring), feel free to carefully move the container around, to keep the liquid nitrogen moving. It speeds up the freezing process a little.

Cocktail Popsicles (aka Cocksicles)

Drugs Without the Hot Air: the most sensible book about drugs you'll read this year

Cory Doctorow at 3:28 am • •

Cambridge's UIT Press has established a well-deserved reputation for publishing clear, engaging, evidence-based books on controversial subjects. Titles like Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air and Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open remain two of the best books I've read on the relationship between environmental responsibility, climate, material wealth, science and engineering -- books that profoundly changed the way I understood these subjects.

The latest in this series is Drugs: Without the Hot Air, by David Nutt. If Nutt's name rings a bell, it's because he was fired from his job as UK drugs czar because he refused to support the government's science-free position on the dangers of marijuana, and because he wouldn't repudiate a paper he wrote that compared the harms of taking Ecstasy to the harms of horseback riding (or "equasy").

Like the other writers in the series, Nutt is both committed to rigorous, evidence-based policy and to clear, no-nonsense prose that makes complex subjects comprehensible. He begins and ends the book with a look at the irrationality of our present drug policy, recounting a call he had with then-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who was furious that he'd compared horseback riding harms to the harms from taking MDMA. Smith says that "you can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal activity." When Nutt asks why not, she says, "because one is illegal." When he asks why it is illegal, she says, "Because it is harmful." So he asks, "Don't we need to compare harms to determine if it should be illegal?" And Smith reiterates, "you can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal activity." Lather, rinse, repeat, and you'll get our current drugs-policy disaster.

Nutt has been talking about harm reduction and evidence-based policy for drugs policy for years, and he often frames the question by pointing out that alcohol is a terrible killer of addicts and the people around them, and a disaster for society. But if he was to synthesize a drug that produced an identical high to alcohol, without producing any of the harms, it would almost certainly be banned and those involved in producing, selling and taking it would be criminalised. We ban drugs because they are harmful and we know they are harmful because they are banned. Drugs that we don't ban -- tobacco, alcohol -- are "harmful" too, but not in the same way as the drugs that are banned, and we can tell that they are different because they haven't been banned.

Nutt has choice words for the alcohol and tobacco industries, who often frame their activity as being supported by responsible choice, and claim that they only want to promote that sort of responsibility. But as Nutt points out, if Britain's drinkers hewed to the recommended drinking levels, total industry revenue would fall by 40% -- and the industry has shown no willingness to regulate super-cheap, high-alcohol booze, nor alcopops aimed at (and advertised to) children and teenagers.

Nutt compares the alcohol industry's self-regulated responsible drinking campaigns to a campaign that exposed students in East Sussex to factual information about the industry's corruption of public health messages, its ferocious lobbying efforts, and the cost of drinking to wider society. It turns out that exposing alcohol industry sleaze is vastly more effective at discouraging student drinking than anything sponsored by the industry itself.

From his discussion of legal drugs, Nutt moves on to factual accounts of the impact of illegal/controlled drugs, from "legal highs" like "meow meow" to opioids to cocaine to prescription painkillers and steroids to psychedelics. Each chapter is a bracing, brisk, no-nonsense inventory of what harms and benefits arise from each substance, the history of their regulation, and the ways in which changes to the means of taking the drugs changes the outcome. Laid out like this, it's easy to see that prohibition isn't ever the right answer -- not for science, not for society, not for justice, and not for health.

There's also a sense of the awful, tragic loss to society arising from the criminalization of promising drugs. A chapter called "Should Scientists Take LSD?" surveys the literature preceding the evidence-free banning of LSD, and the astounding therapeutic benefits hinted at in the literature.

The book closes with the War on Drugs, and the worlds' governments own frank assessments of the unmitigated disaster created by Richard Nixon's idiotic decision 40 years ago. Nutt analyzes the fact that policymakers know that the War on Drugs is worse than the drugs themselves (by a long shot), but are politically incapable of doing anything about it, not least because politicians on all sides stand poised to condemn their opponents for being "soft on drugs."

After this, there is a frank chapter on talking with your children about drugs. Nutt is a parent and has some regrets about how he approached the subject with his own children (one of his sons was stalked by a British tabloid journalist, who tricked him into friending him on Facebook, which gave the journalist the opportunity to gank photos of the young man smoking marijuana). As a parent, this stuff really resonated with me -- sensible advice that focuses on establishing and maintaining trust.

Drugs is available in the UK already, and will be published in the USA in September. It's a book that everyone should read.

Drugs: Without the Hot Air

Giant murderous half-ton car-part junkbot will hold 32 bottles of wine for you

Cory Doctorow at 10:57 am • •

A welder in Phoenix assembled a robot out of car and motorcycle parts that serves as a wine-rack. It weighs "Approx 1,000lbs," stands six feet high, holds 32 bottles of wine (or other beverage of choice) and is liberally wired up with glowing LEDs. Yours for a mere $7,000.00.

For the discerning individual who appreciates artwork and wine - you now have a great opportunity to meld those together into one piece of artwork that will display your bottle collection like no other wine rack. This will make you the talk of your wine club, HOA, alcoholics anonymous support group, etc...
There are only several times in one's life when one has the opportunity to purchase something that is RIDICULOUSLY COOL. This is one of those moments.
Need something unique? Sure, you could certainly go to the local Mercedes dealership and pick up a G55 or wait until next year's G63 comes out and yes, it would be unique, you'd be the talk of your friends, and ride around in style but it wouldn't be any different than the next G55 or G63 rolling around. Nooooo waaaaaaay man! Those suckers are mass produced!! You see those all over the place in Scottsdale!
What ya need is a one-off piece of artwork that you will not find anywhere else in the metropolitan area and likely - the entire state.

Half Ton Transformer-style Wine Rack made of auto transmission parts - $7000 (North Phoenix)

Cthulhu tiki mug

Cory Doctorow at 6:27 pm • •

Jonathan Chaffin has discovered the true purpose of crowdfunding: producing cthulhoid tiki mugs. The project is funded and more-than-funded, but there's still time to stump up for a $40 horror in which to serve your Mai Tai R'lyeh. Or kick in more and get a whole contrafactual universe worth of tik-th-ul-hu kipple.

As incentive, the rewards are not just cunning bits of practical design (matchbooks and the like), but all of the rewards house clues and hints about the origin of the mug and the idol on which it is based. A lifetime of tabletop RPGs and short horror fiction led me to design an entire history for the Horror In Clay tiki mug. The tale is told through ephemera, coasters, and matchbooks. I even tied them into other horror works. Oh, and I have a colophon if anyone asks. I will be posting all kinds of information about creating the mug, short videos, hints about the back story, and whatever else I think of as updates through out the kickstarter, so stay tuned! (Among other things, I have the outtakes from the video shoot which are pretty funny in their own right).

The Horror In Clay Cthulhu tiki mug production run (via IO9)

Bottle-Cap Blues: HOWTO open a beer with pretty much anything

Cory Doctorow at 8:00 am • •

I liked Chris Sumers's "Bottle Cap Blues," a well-edited and nicely shot comic short featuring all the different (and often dangerous) ways by which one might open a stubbourn beer bottle when caught without a church-key.

This is a short film that I was a part of for Adam Young's solo Art Show at Common House Gallery entitled: Songs of the Early Riser. Adam had a concept for a video installation. I took his concept and put it into a video. We originally had 4 different edits looping at the show in his installation, but this edit is a compilation of my favorite clips from the three day shoot. This has been the most fun project I have been a part of to date. Sitting around with your friends killing a couple of six packs of beer trying to think of different means to open your next drink is pretty fun. I encourage you to try it.

Bottle Cap Blues (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Disneyland's tiki bar has its own tiki mugs

Cory Doctorow at 7:10 am • •

Trader Sam's, the (fab) Trader Vic's knockoff tiki bar at the Disneyland Hotel, has rolled out its own line of souvenir tiki mugs, which are reminiscent of the old Trader Vic's mugs, but with rather good designs that are all their own.

New Tiki mugs are Trader Sam’s Barrel Mug, with Shipwreck on the Rocks made with bourbon, freshly muddled lemon and mint with organic agave nectar. “Have too many of these and you’ll be setting a course for Davy Jones’ locker!”
Also new is the “bowl” for the Uh Oa! This popular drink is made with light and dark rums, orange, passion fruit, guava, and grapefruit juices, falernum, cinnamon and freshly squeezed lime juice. This one is “recommended for two or more guests,” so be responsible and share with your friendly natives.

Check Out New Souvenir Cocktail Glasses at Trader Sam’s at the Disneyland Hotel

Hidden pint-glass QR code is only visible when filled with Guinness

Cory Doctorow at 10:14 pm • •

A clever bit of advertising gimmickry from Guinness: these pint glasses bear QR codes than can't be read when the glass is empty, nor when it is filled with amber-colored beers. But when filled with black, murky Guinness, the revealed QR code can finally be scanned: "it tweets about your pint, updates your facebook status, checks you in via 4 square, downloads coupons and promotions, invites your friends to join, and even launches exclusive Guiness content."

Yeah, so the last part is a bit of a nightmare.

Guinness QR Cup