Given a properly adjusted cutter, it seems to me you _should_ be able to get the same sound quality out of these as out of vinyl records. If I remember correctly, it was possible to get about 5 minutes onto one side of a standard 45 disk; you should be able to get one pop song's worth of audio in both groove and optical onto a single disk.

But I agree that this is a "who cares if it's practical, it's just plain entertaining" idea.

#5... Yeah, that could work. Good thought, Certron.

I suspect this is just plain stupidity rather than satanism.

The conversation which lead to it probably started after smoking a few too many bowls while watching some historical/horror flick featuring skulls used as bowls or drinking cups or something of that sort.

"Hey, man. That's cool. I want one of those."
"Oh, wow. But it'd be even cooler if it was a bong." "Yeah. Where can we get a skull?"

Then neither of them's willing to back down as they sober up, for fear of looking like an idiot -- so instead they follow through and remove all doubt.

Teenagers. Too old to be cute, too young to be fully socialized. It's a miracle most of 'em survive without doing serious damage.

Wearing art on your belt is a fine thing, but this isn't the design I'd have chosen for that location. Snagging it on the surroundings would seem to be an issue, as is... "Is that your belt buckle, or are you glad to see me?"

I suppose people managed to learn not to bump their codpieces into things, so maybe it's managable. But my reaction is "Nice bit of metalwork, but that isn't where I'd put it unless I *wanted* people heckling me for impracticality of design."

This would pair nicely with the Edison-style cylinder recorder previously mentioned that uses plastic cups as its media...

I have visions of sending out a demo disk with optical on one side and a groove on the other... Wouldn't work with CDRs, where the reflective layer is on the label side and probably wouldn't survive the cutting process... but might with some of the other variants.

When you need someone to byte the header off a live checksum, you can always count on the Geek.

Just don't ask for an image. Beware of Geeks bearing GIFs.

Waiting to see the experiment replicated, and tested with other radio frequencies and other patterns of traffic. (Is a bluetooth headset more, or less, problematic? Presumably it's a lower-stength signal, if nothing else...)

My phone spends 99.95% of its time in its belt pouch; I've used about 30 minutes of airtime since I got it a year ago. (Yes, I'm on a prepaid plan...) Since my gut and points south haven't yet complained about having a transmitter in the neighborhood, I'm not gonna worry too much about it for now.

There needs to be a matching reading/munching/laptop tray, preferably one with dials and switches and meters. I move it be sold as "the Giger counter".

(g, d, r...)

Note that genuine ASCII -- the 0-128 character range -- is identical to the low range of Unicode, and that the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode takes advantage of that so any proper ASCII text is also legitimate UTF-8 text. So the division claimed above between ASCII and UTF-8 may be misleading, unless the data is explicitly tagged with which encoding the author intended it be interpreted as.

(Of course if you insisted on using one of the extended codepages, that's a different matter ... but that isn't properly ASCII; it's Latin-1 or whatever else and belongs on one of the other lines.)

It may be worth noting that Unicode is the native character set for XML, and for Java and a number of other recent languages, which may have helped to encourage people to move in this direction. A good idea helps; good tooling helps more; tooling that makes doing the right thing easier than doing the wrong thing helps most.

OK, how long before someone does a low-tech parody of this for horizontal "flight", powered by the traditional fire-extinguisher reaction engine or some other less volatile source? If you really want it to feel like flying, replace the casters with hoverpads.

As one company's new-hire orientation put it: "Practicing docking maneuvers is forbidden on company time and furniture."

It shouldn't be surprising to find that interesting things can be done in a few kilobytes. It SHOULD be surprising that people burn megabytes to achieve the same things. Similar comments apply to performance.

Part of that comes from the desire to produce a lot of code quickly and cheaply. Driving software costs down has meant the industry is willing to use design practices which aren't as efficient. We've gotten away with it because PCs have expanded their capability even faster... but essentially this is a matter of transferring some costs from the software to the hardware, and from the software developers to the folks buying the box to run it on. Which isn't entirely unreasonable.

But a lot of it is pure sloppiness, which software developers get away with because the typical PC user doesn't know enough to object.

The full movie's apparently available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHS44U6FDlo

Trance 'n dental? Or just dance 'n dental?

Re #7: It allows a phone to work on networks other than the one that originally sold it to you, without having to go through the complicated time-critical process of keying an unlock code into the phone or the even more complicated techniques of mucking with the circuitry to reset that lock.

It's legal -- you own the phone. And in fact some phone companies will happily give you an unlock code, but only AFTER you have been with their plan for at least the minimum time so they've recaptured their original sign-up discount on the phone.

Another vote for "Keep us informed; if it's at least as good as the trailer I want a copy.:

From its description: "Does not do any changes to your SIM card or phone (you only have to make a cut in the SIM card)"

OK, that's a change _to_ the SIM rather than _in_, but still it's enough to make me nervous.

If anyone has positive experience with this, I'm interested. I'm considering upgrading, but would prefer to do so via a used phone, at least initially...

Well, now we know how a steampunk engineer would construct a voice synthesizer... or the first stages thereunto.

I suppose this could also be considered a high-tech "talking drum" for languages which don't have the clicks and plosives those drums were designed for.

The claim that it's smart enough to explore the sonic characteristics of its "found" instruments and figure out how to match those against the audio input is what really impresses me. Not that difficult, I suppose -- but a nice concept. Meta-art.

That sort of caveat-emptor attitude used to be common in some of the larger NYC camera shops. You could get good prices, but you hand to know exactly what you were asking for and whether what they were actually offering to sell you was the same thing. Grey-market products (unauthorized imports with no US warranty) were common, as were substitutions of no-name components (you get the projector at the advertised price, but it comes with no lens or a knock-off lens). If you made enough stink you could get the advertised merchandise at the advertised price, but you had to be willing to stand there noisily arguing and scaring off other customers until they gave in.

Some people put up with this because the prices -- AFTER haggling -- were decent. Some just overpaid without realizing it. And many just said "not worth my effort" and bought elsewhere.

Sounds like someone moved that business model to the web -- though it's hard to be sure whether it's the store or the customer who's playing hardball here. Maybe both. Unfortunately for the store, posted reviews are visible longer and more broadly than one unhappy customer complaining in the store, and negotiations are more public...

OK, the DJ Q-Bert piece had me grinning ear to ear; perfect match of animation style with the music and storyline. That one's a keeper.

Oh gods, my pack-rat instincts kicked in bigtime when I saw that. It's begging to be rescued...

(I can't help it. I's a child of the space age. If it looks like a rocket ship, I'm hooked.)

Applause! I _like_ the concept.

(My girlfriend independently came up with something similar: She uses libraries in reverse. She buys books, reads them, then -- if they're good enough to be worth reading, but not stunning enough that she feels she needs to keep a copy immediately on hand -- donates them to her favorite library. Not quite the same result, since those probably go onto the resale shelf rather than directly into the collections, but it's the same basic concept of "if you liked it, share it.")

#00FF00 Power! (Printed with soy-based inks on an unbleached shirt...)

The simple answer is that yes, acoustic violins get a large part of their sound not just from their shape, but from the precise details of the resonance modes of the wood.

However, once you go electric you're generally bypassing all of that. As with an electric guitar, which can be a hunk of fiberglass with no resonance and all, an electric fiddle may be nothing much more than strings, a bridge, a neck and a chin rest. There are skeleton versions for those who want to minimize weight or just think they look cool -- the violin equivalent of a "stick" guitar.

In fact, if you're going to be processing the sound, you may not actually want much physical resonance; it may be easier to just start with a simple bowed string (approximately a sawtooth wave, iirc) and let the circuits fill it out.

And in some cases such beasts are actually MIDI controllers -- not even electro-acoustic, never mind acoustic.

So: Yeah, this probably compromises the instrument's function as a traditional violin. But it may not be being used as a traditional violin, so that may not matter.

No, I haven't yet started construction on my own MIDI instrument. I'm still hung up on wanting to use a strain gauge for one of the inputs, and not having time to track down a reasonably-priced source for hobbyist quantities and advice on how to mount it to achieve my goal of an Infinitely Efficient Bellows.

The compactness may drive the price up. On the other (ahem) hand... Clock mechanisms are available off-the-shelf for homebrewers; maybe someone could come up with press-on adapter rings for those which achieve the same provide-your-own-hands effect. You'd need to mount it from behind the panel, but if you're on a budget...

"Quality, Service, and Price! (Pick any two.)"

Any merchant who uses such a list or has such a policy probably isn't one you really want to do business with anyway, unless they have a stellar reputation otherwise and/or are selling for an ungodly low price.

I'm inclined to let them use such a list, *IF* they announce it clearly before the customer places the order and *IF* the credit card company announces clearly on their own marketing material that they permit vendors to do so.

Then it would be up to the consumer to decide whether to do business with a vendor or lender who considers this a reasonable way of doing business, and market forces should Do The Right Thing, Mostly.

For those who want to know the results:

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/05/01/winners-of-the-seaga.html

I ponder this periodically. I'm a regular blood donor (every other month) and platelet donor (when I can get to a center which has the pheresis machines). But marrow donation -- if you're ever called -- is a somewhat more serious commitment. Not as high as surgical organ donation, certainly, but not quite as safe as blood donation.

On the other hand, it's a much more direct life-and-death contribution. So maybe it's worth that higher commitment.

I do find the concept of charging people to register a bit odd. Yes, there's a bookkeeping cost. But it seems to me that this ought to be borne by the recipient, if you want to encourage donors. Unless you're actively trying to discourage folks who aren't seriously committed...

I agree, I'd love to see a proper video discussing and demonstrating the design and operation of this beast. In case you've ever wondered why we "crank out the numbers"...

One of the problems with mechanical calculator was the frictional losses in those long gear chains. So a larger machine might need "torque amplifiers" between stages... and I can just see those being steam-powered...

Or punk-powered if you prefer. "Don't just sit there, you lazy sod; help crank the computer!" I can just see a team of computational bellows-pumpers...

I agree that it's an art piece. Doesn't strike me as _good_ art, or at least not more than as a performance piece, but de gustibus.

Personally I'd prefer to go out and buy myself a small metalshop's worth of tools and do much more complicated things to the metal. Cheaper, and for me more entertaining -- and you get to keep the tools for other projects.

(Metalwork is on my "learn someday" list. I know it's not all that much harder than woodwork, but given that I don't have enough time for woodwork either...)

Yep, classic tape echo. Why anyone would go to the trouble of building it out of cassettes is a Mystery to me, but what the heck -- "just because we can" is sometimes good enough.

(Some day I need to build a cryptographic machine, with space inside it to hold a detective novel, into which I'd insert a slip of paper with a brief question... just because there really ought to be a physical instantiation of Churchill's "riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an Enigma.")

Footnote: if I'd known you were interested in self-driven randomoutput more than interactive output, I think I coulda done that, via the same kind of momentum/well/random push which drives the color sequences. Didn't quite have time to do that variant as well.

Oh well; if I find time to do the enhanced version I can toss it in then.

I'm honored by the company I'm keeping; congrats to the other winners.

As always, the real winning condition is "amuse the judges" ... so the challenge is finding a twist on the idea that gives your entry some unique appeal. I knew I wasn't going to be able to compete with Tiny Mona on pure artistic merit (that really is a nice job of digital miniature painting), so I went after the interactivity niche, trying to get the most "long-term play value" out of the available bytes.

Interesting seeing what came out in what order. That may (or may not) imply a few hints on what's likely to win in the future.

For what it's worth, I like little Mona better than big Mona. At the small size, the square pixels aren't as noticable... and it has the appeal of a traditional miniature painting, where part of what's impressive is how much detail the human visual system interpolates when given suitable hints.

But big Mona -- or little Mona magnified -- is a nice illustration of how much detail work was needed to make the shading come out well.

Stubbe: I'd really like to see some documentation of how your entry works. I haven't played with 3D/pseudo-3D rendering since the days when we would have had to code most of the geometry and shading ourselves and build up all the frames in batch mode rather than realtime. Whole different ballgame these days.

Flip phones put the speaker at the ear and the microphone at the mouth, as God and Ma Bell intended. That really does result in better sound quality than trying to pick up sound from behind the jaw or asking users to hold the phone with their fingertips so their palm will reflect sound back to it.

May not matter to the phone owner; does matter to whoever's on the other end of the conversation. Or so it seems to me. But I'm an occasional sound tech; I've been trained to a hatred of lavalier microphones for the same reasons.

Of course if you're one of those whose phone use is entirely via bluetooth headset, the location of the phone's own transducers may be irrelevant. And for some the phone's size does matter more. Flip phones may also be a bit more prone to some kinds of damage, though I'm not convinced they're much worse in that regard than any of the other moving-parts designs.

I'm using a one-piece-brick phone myself right now, far from the smallest available, because It Was Cheap. I don't feel a great need for smaller, per se, though I do occasionally dither over switching to a combined phone/organizer rather than carrying two devices.

... OK, and I'll admit it: I grew up with Original Star Trek. The flip phone amuses me. It would amuse me even more if it emitted the communicator's characteristic power-up whistle as it was flipped open.

("Beam me up, Mr. Scott; there's no intelligent life on this planet.")

@Thad -- I suspect that's because the motivating prize was the disk drive, so most of us were biased toward thinking in terms of data.

Also, 1000 bytes or words makes for something that's easy to submit electronically. If someone had taken it as 1000 real-world objects, they'd have had to not only craft their entry but create electronic documentation for it (a good photo, or instructions for replicating it, or...). Arguably that's a bit more work.

On the other hand, anything that might amuse the judges is certainly worth considering.

I'm very glad that I'm an entrant, not a judge. This isn't just apples and oranges, it's apples and orangutans -- there's a lot of good stuff here, taking the idea in very different directions.

Nice work, everyone!

As someone else said: This fuzzy contest is a concept worth repeating periodically, maybe with different themes rather than coming back to 1K.

Back in the Altair/Imsai days, someone was selling a system built into a desk -- the rear 2/3 of the top tilted upward to expose a vertical surface with the monitor, cassette-tape drive, sense switches and lights (I dunno about anyone else, but I _miss_ those even though they'd be completely useless now), and a few other controls.

Definite Walter Mitty appeal.

Re 42: Rob, I don't mind over-the-top if it's creative. Building up or ripping down.

I do object when it's badly written, rudeness lazily trying to be clever and failing. Which this, alas, was. Or so it reads to me; others may see it differently, and de gustibus non disputandum est.

If a joke needs this much defending, it has failed.

Like I said: We know you can do better, and we believe you want to. If we didn't, we wouldn't be spending the time trying to help you do so.

#30: Problem is, when interpreted as "surreal fiction" this piece just isn't up to BoingBoing's usual writing standards. It's cheap-shot offensiveness-trying-to-be-humor at best.

If what you've got to say today isn't worth posting, skip a day.

Could someone clarify what a "piano style keyboard" is, or provide a pointer to an explanation? Quick websearch didn't find that phrase in conjunction with Lenovo, and indeed mostly found MIDI devices.

#32: Bingo.

#31: Drifting offtopic, but: Many humorists have pointed out that (a) most of the common English "curse words" really shouldn't be particularly shocking or insulting, and (b) we have, alas, completely lost the art of the _creative_ insult, replacing it with unthinking repetition of those few words.

Those T-shirt designs offer fine opportunities for creative comebacks, if you really need to rant. I don't claim these are good, I'm just suggesting them as a better response to the provocation.

• Specialist: "I can talk about this stuff for hours"

But what this customer needs to know can be said in minutes. Can you do that? Didn't think so...

• Concierge: "I know people"

Fine. Have your people call my people and they'll do lunch. Meanwhile, can someone help me?

• Creative: "All gain, no pain"

Off your diet and back on the happy-pills again?

• Genius: "Not all heroes wear capes"

Not all villains do either. Your point?

(I'm gonna be kind to the back-of-house folks and not even try to ding them. They take enough flack already, and they're less likely than the others to cop an attitude.)

I agree that the snark level is a bit excessive here -- and I'm no Apple fan. (I don't hate 'em either.) The right response to arrogance is not more arrogance; that just weakens your argument.

Maybe the problem is precisely that Apple users have adopted the brand being part of their self-image, so when the stores do something which -- I grant -- is slightly pathetic, Apple's customers feel embarrassed by it. If so... Get over it, folks. Apple makes mistakes too, including marketing mistakes. That doesn't imply anything bad about your beloved widget -- if it was right for you then it's still right for you now. It just means that you can't assume that Apple will always be perfect. Since you shouldn't have assumed that anyway, that shouldn't be a problem, right?

If this really bothers you, go into one of the stores (preferably one where you have a buying history) and tell the manager that you've heard about this campaign and would consider it a major turn-off, driving you to shop by mail rather than buying there. If they get enough negative reactions DIRECTLY TIED TO POTENTIAL SALES, they'll fix it.

If it's worth grumbling about, it's worth fixing. And if it's worth asking for help in fixing, it's worth phrasing that request in a form folks will actually enjoy reading. If you've gotta snark, do so more creatively and entertainingly, hm?

Ah. Finally saw the video; I agree, this is an interestingly different object. Fine desk toy. Just keep it away from magnetic media and your screen...

Agree with #3. Paraphrasing John Varley, I'm sure the dog would be wondering "why does everything out there smell like plastic and my breath?"

Then again, they aren't trying to sell it to the dog. They're trying to guilt-trip the human into buying it. So it needs to seem attractive to the human. If the dog never uses it... well, they still make a profit.

Bad-joke warning:

Use the original (reflection) version of my toy to draw a pair of adjacent half-ovals, Decorate appropriately. Watch the color changes ripple through it.

Caption:

"This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?"

I worked in an office which had the single-barrel version of this rubber-band gatling gun. Nice simple mechanism. Fun to demonstrate, but a bit of a nuclear flyswatter... better as something brought out for ceremonial events, or just displayed for folks to ponder, than as a day-to-day toy.

(I always preferred the no-equipment rubberband gun: Extend index finger, loop rubberband from there around back of thumb and across palm to pinkie, hook it there. Point at target in classic little-kid "bang" position, twitch pinkie to shoot.)

I've been told that Rubik actually designed the cube as a mechanical-engineering visualization puzzle, challenging students to explain how it operated (without disassembling it, of course). According to this story, the fact that it was also a challenging combinatorial puzzle (which is of course what it was mass-marketed as) was pure serendipity after one was painted with different colors on each face.

No, I don't have a citation. But I can easily believe it.

I believe the Instructables website has previously featured homemade Rubikoid puzzles which used magnets in place of the original hub-and-pivot system. I wonder how/whether those differ significantly from NeoCube.

My name... is Neo.

There are also companies which ship their software on small USB keys rather than CD/DVD.

And folks churning out USB-key copies of software demos for trade shows. "Take it home and try it; at worst, you've got a free USB key with our name on it."

For any medium, someone will want to churn out copies in production quantities, and someone else will make a buck building them a machine to do so. What's more interesting here is that someone thinks there's enough of a market to justify advertising the machine as a product. The real test is going to be how much this cloner costs.

Am I allowed to submit two entries? If not, then my first entry remains the official one; I sent it in first. But...

By moving just a few characters (same code size), it's possible to configure my code to produce rotational symmetry rather then reflection symmetry. You can see the result at http://testwww.lovesong.com/people/keshlam/1Kalternate.html

(Yeah, I know; I really ought to get both these effects into a single 1K block of code. Still working on that. I've got 22 bytes left; it certainly ought to be possible...)

Reportedly, it isn't unheard-of for woodworkers to make their own coffins. Then they're stuck with the problem of what to do with it until they die. I'm told it's not uncommon to design 'em so the coffin-specific hardware (carrying rails and the like) dismounts until needed, letting them be used as storage chests which are only slightly strange... at least until you open them and notice they're padded.

Of course, if I ever did that (unlikely; I view it as a waste of good woodworking) I'd need to make sure one of the things it contained was a bag of "graveyard dirt"... just to spook anyone who's too inquisitive.

"I do not drink... wine."

Followup: Turns out that my applet is less responsive on Linux than on Windows. It does improve after you've played with it a bit (delayed JIT optimization?), but even so I have to admit it isn't as pretty. May be tweakable; may be an artifact of the differences between PM and X. Investigating.

"The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be."

... My standard three-word summary of that universal truth: "Reality is fractal."

My entry can be found at http://www.lovesong.com/people/keshlam/1Kchallenge.html

It's a simple Java "mandala painting" applet, whose source code has been hammered down to 978 bytes. I still hope to get the executable below the 1K mark too, but I don't think I'm going to achieve that before the deadline. Conversely, there are features which I'd like to add to make this even more addictive... but they'd push me over the 1K mark so I can't include them in this version.

I've done transfinite amounts of Java coding, but unlike most folks I've been using it as a traditional programming language rather than doing GUI stuff -- most of my Java code has been back-end utilities. I think this is the first applet I've written in the past decade. Thanks for the excuse to play!

My school had a copy of this set, which they kept in a locked cabinet... perhaps to protect it, perhaps because they didn't want to deal with the concept of us studying the pelvic structure slides. Not that a dissection is particularly erotic material.

I'm almost afraid to ask, but... Any chance we could find out where you lifted the film/video clips from?

Y'know, for most of what I need to do portably, a Palm -- perhaps a Treo so it has the thumb keyboard and so I don't need to carry a separate phone -- really is more than sufficient. How often do I *REALLY* need my whole code development environment plus my whole audio processing suite plus the games plus... available on impulse?

OK, I admit I chose an MP3 player by the fact that it had enough disk space to store my entire audio collection. And I'd like to combine that with the above functionality. But I think folks are getting too hung up on trying to cram full PCs into portable devices rather than taking the time to think about what functionality is actually _useful_ in a portable device.

Yes, there are those who actually do need a full PC when they're on the road. But most of those will also need a decent size screen and keyboard. I'm honestly not sure that the awkward space between palmtop and laptop is worth filling.

Unfortunately, in an effort to push us toward signing up for the yearly plans, over-the-counter prices on cell phones have been kept artificially high. Sure, if I paid $30/month rather than $100/year on a per-minute prepay plan, they would be delighted to use some of the extra profit to "give" me a fancy new phone... but that pricing model isn't really a net win for either me or the networks; it discourages my upgrading, which discourages me from burning (and paying for) more minutes.

Grump, grump, grump.

(For what it's worth, T-Mobile seems to have the best prepaid plan right now. Of course that's subject to change at any moment.)

Valid question.

While I will applaud creative and elegant design in any form, I don't believe in diluting the meaning of useful terminology. Steampunk is one specific style; related styles are a fine thing but deserve their own names, and/or a more general term which steampunk would then be one particular subset of. Art Techno to go with Art Deco, maybe. (Techno Deco? Techno Devo?)

But this is another instance of the "reality is fractal" problem. Human endeavors don't divide cleanly into categories; there will always be a fuzzy edge with exceptions upon the exceptions to the exceptions. The general customization aesthetic of which steampunk is a part is clearly a movement rather than a style per se; folks who are interested in it will appreciate and applaud creative customization in a wide variety of styles even if it doesn't fit the specific style they work in.

On the other hand: the same piece, in different contexts, may be categorized differently. Part of the fun of playing with steampunk or other styles is finding the objects which weren't intended to be interpreted that way but which can be recontextualized -- sometimes with no modification at all -- and made to fit. I think Datamancer's design may be dancing on that edge. It doesn't have the ornateness that I like in some of the steampunk work I've seen... but its simplicity and the choice of materials means that you could probably drop it into a steampunk-styled room without it feeling out of place.

So while I agree that you've posed a good question, I'm not sure the answer is cut-and-dried. I think it would depend on what you surrounded this with. It doesn't scream steampunk all by itself, unlike some of the other designs we've seen... but I'm not sure I'd say it clearly _isn't_ either.

The idea of trying it again from scratch is interesting.

The idea of doing it with deliberately bad not-even-conversational timing... isn't.

If you don't insist on keys that change dynamically as you type on them... Remember the old IBM keyboards (the ones with snap-off keycaps)? Transparent caps were available for those, so you could create custom key layouts. There was even a convenient little tool to make snapping and unsnapping these faster and easier, without the risk of popping the whole key out.

Half my keyboards used to sport a key labeled "ANY", just because so many DOS applications asked for one. A few spelled out messages, which drove non-touchtypists crazy.

Alas, now that everything has been cost-reduced, we've lost that easy flexibility in keyboard layout/appearance. Maybe that justifies the expen$ive display-keyboard, at least as an experimental base... though frankly, I find myself wondering whether it might be better to just use a single touchscreen behind a transparent keyboard. Or maybe a completely separate display; after all, I don't have transparent fingers and touchtypists rarely actually see the keyboard anyway.

Re #20: Don't confuse coca and cocaine. Coca-leaf ta is still legal in many countries, and isn't a problem; the dosage is low enough that it's no more harmful than caffeine in tea and coffee. (Probably no better for you either...)

Philosophical point: The reason plants developed all these substances is as insecticides. It doesn't take much caffeine to overstimulate a bug to death. Homo sap, with our higher body mass, is able to tolerate higher dosages -- and is weird enough to enjoy low levels of some toxic substances, plus clever enough to realize that sometimes the effects can be useful... but if you work hard enough at it, you can OD on anything. Including water, as some atheletes have found.

Caution is always warranted. But a bit more rationality about what the actual risks are would be a good thing. A balance of exaggeration in opposing directions does not equal a balanced treatment.

For what it's worth: I've been told that there are plenty of biochemists who Really Want to do proper studies of the cannabanoids (apologies if I've botched the spelling; too lazy to look it up right now), but the government's so paranoid about the idea that someone might (ahem) "take their work home with them" that it's essentially impossible to get permission. That's a real pity, because it leaves us relying mostly on anecdotal evidence and biased sources. I'd really prefer to base my own opinions on something more than that. I don't really care whether the outcome is that the stuff is as harmless as soap or has insidious permanent effects that haven't been properly accounted for; I just want to KNOW what we're dealing with and make decisions on an honest basis.

#1 is an overstatement for effect, but I have to agree with the idea. "Alcohol: It's just a drink" would be a better analogy.

Tobacco is "just a plant". So are many deadlier substances. Not all plants are safe to eat, or inhale, or otherwise ingest, whether you're an adult or not. (Something the herbal-medicine folks also need to be more straightforward about. Some people are more sensitive that others. Some react differently. Some develop dependencies they can't manage, and even a managed dependency can be a problem.

I haven't seen this book. Maybe it deals with those issues properly. So I'm withholding judgement... but the title is far from encouraging.

(I happen to believe that pot is probably safer than alcohol -- not that I've ever developed a taste for either -- and that legalize/control quality/tax is a better approach. Time to give up this price-support-for-organized-crime regime.)

Remember, Microsoft is not primarily a technology business. They're a marketing business. It just happens that what they're marketing is technology products.

Understanding that explains their successes, and their failures.

Nice industrial design, but...

Talk to a sewage-treatment engineer sometime. They _HATE_ in-sink disposal units. Their systems are set up to process material which has been ... uhm... predigested; throwing nontrivial amounts of raw foodstuffs into the stream throws the mix of nutrients off balance and causes significant trouble at the plant.

Vegetable trimmings and the like should be composted. (If you're in an apartment, websearch "worm box") Meats and fats and bones should be tossed in the trash, not down the drain.

If someone comes up with a reasonable way to feed an in-sink grinder into a composting system, and/or a composting system that can deal with animal products, _that_ would be interesting.

Ah yes; I remember that issue. (Yes, I remember the 60's, which proves I wasn't there.)

The question is, who's going to take this and redesign it into an immersive user interface chamber?

I'd almost be willing to pay the $20 just to applaud the idea... if they didn't have such a short expiration date. $20 per year is a bit rich for my blood.

So, yeah, I'm tempted to swipe it. If I do, I'll send a donation... once.

Could I go back? Depends on what I wanted to do.

For personal e-mail, I could mostly give up instant gratification and go back to working offline and then uploading/downloading in batch mode. The main problem would be all the idiots who insist on sending HTML mail and similar space-wasters.

Similarly, most of my larger personal downloads are things which I *could* run overnight, given a smart download tool which could properly recover from interruptions (which are more of an issue when the session is longer).

I'd slightly miss streaming video. Streaming audio would be a notch behind that.

For work, where I'm doing massive codebase synchronizations, it's a very different kettle of worms.

#11: Read the licence agreement on the Leopard software. I'll bet dollars to donuts that it's currently licenced only for use on Apple hardware, and installing it on anything else would be a violation of your contract and -- if they wanted to make the effort -- actionable under civil law.

Opening it up might be interesting. On the other hand, if I want an open and/or free Mac-like system it's easy enough to just install Linux.

The Mac's main advantage has always been that because it is a _closed_ system they can tune the OS specifically for their hardware. You give up versitility and the ability to build clones in exchange for "just plug it in and it works" being a promise rather than a goal.

I don't think I want to ask whether this has a legal OS license.

The original intent of HTML was that people would do semantically meaningful markup, and all the prettifying would be done at the time the page was rendered... with the user selecting the rendering that suited their needs.

Then people started making their websites pretty at the expense of meaningful, and this ideal was lost. Then Flash and the like came along and trashed the idea completely.

I'm still a firm believe that a general-access website starts with meaningful text, with the rendering left as free as possible. If it doesn't go through BOBBY or another accessibility checker without complaints, it's wrong. If it doesn't display usably in a VGA-or-smaller window, it's wrong. Keep the markup simple and meaningful, and offer users the _option_ of styling it into something fancier if they so choose.

Should have passed you that pointer when I first saw this go by, I guess.... The thing that blows me away about this design is the clever construction of glowing "burner" that puts the steam back in steampunk. (OK, so maybe it's thermoelectric or some other technology not known in our world -- but it's certainly coal-fired, which is good enough for me.)

First project's refinishing the library floor. Then installing appropriate period bookcases (mid-1800's, to match the age of the house). THEN I can think about whether to create a custom computer to match the theme.

Proper theater organ. It's a pity he didn't have a proper movie theater to go with it.

(I'm still waiting for the Constellation Center to break ground. One of their performance spaces is intended to be able to function as a full-scale silent-movie palace, with space for organ and orchestra, when it isn't being used for other things.)

I agree it's a non-story... except in so far as it gives us an opportunity to discuss marketing practice.

A book of this sort isn't to reassure kids about cosmetic surgery -- it's to sell the idea of cosmetic surgery to kids before they're old enough to be skeptical about the idea. Or maybe to sell it to parents who would find that explaining it to their kids caused them to reassess whether it's really needed.

Otherwise, they'd focus on more medically reasonable examples. Removal of a growth (I've had a few cysts dealt with myself). Repair of a scar that's causing trouble. Maybe even breast _reduction_, as an alternative which opens the question without getting so much into the "Barbie" space. There are lots of legitimate kinds of plastic surgery, including some which are elective/cosmetic without perpetuating the idea that one needs to look like much more than a healthy human.

Hey, turn the pigs into biodiesel -- that's doing a fine job of driving up the price of corn here in the Untied States. And rendering them down for lard to be processed into oil ought to be even more ridiculously wasteful of resources.

Now if only they'd export more Canadian bacon to the US. What we get under the name of bacon is strips of salted fat.

Had one of the magnetic-contact electronic kits, The upside is that you couldn't fail due to loose connections. The downside is that since the connection possibilities were so limited, there was virtually no room to experiment.

As others have said: Cantenna. The coffee-can (side-fired) version is a heck of a lot easier to build than the original Pringles Yagi, and is ugly enough to carry a certain McGuyveresque klugemeister cachet.

Websearch will find comparitive ratings of these and other designs, along with reports from folks who have used them together with parabolic reflectors scavenged from old satellite recievers and otherwise tweaked.

"Tiny, gorgeous, and runs Vista" -- well, two out of three ain't bad. If they give it a Linux build, with good device drivers, I'll be much more interested.

I like the idea of extending mechanical license to other media.

But as I understand it, mechanical licence is actually a voluntary program, instituted because the concept of "cover performances" already existed and copyright holders generally want to facilitate that because it's considered part of their income stream. And it's actually quite limited in how the material can be used. You can't make any but trivial changes to a song's lyrics under mechanical license; if you want to do much more than changing "he" to "she" in a love song, you need to go negotiate an explicit license.

Before someone brings it up: The parody exception to copyright is likewise quite limited; the new work has to directly respond to and comment upon the original. It's ironically safer to portray Disney characters as dope fiends and perverts than to do a respectful homage.

(Which reminds me, I really wish I knew what happened to the black-light animated-character orgy poster I had when I was a kid; it'd probably be something of a collector's item now.)

I'm really torn on the copyright question.

On the one hand: I'm a firm believer that folks should get the full value of their creative work. That's one way we encourage people to make the effort to create. ("Money is the sincerest form of applause...")

On the other hand: The other reason copyright (and patent) exists is to encourage _publication_ of those creative efforts... which is also why these rights time out; after the artist/inventor/craftsman/whatever has taken a fair profit from their work, we want it to continue to be generally available to society.

I can respect a deliberate decision to take a work off the market for a while to let demand for it build up enough to justify a new print run. But simply letting stuff fall out of print because nobody cares enough strikes me as a disservice to all concerned.

Hence, I'd favor some system which required that folks periodically re-assert that, yes, they actually do still care about copyright on that item. If they miss the deadline, I'd give the original creator first opportunity to recapture the rights (covering the case where they sold the rights to someone else who isn't pursuing them); if they don't do so, I'd argue that the work should immediately fall into the public domain without waiting for the full life-plus to elapse.

It might be necessary to charge a nuisance fee just to fund the tracking. I'm not sure it would be necessary to charge more than that, since the real goal of this is to recover from the cases where (to take a specific example) a publishing house falls apart and, since nobody can agree on who actually has the rights, there is a "discourteous agreement" that none of the previous owners can do anything with the material. I suspect that if sitting on those rights had just a bit of nuisance associated with it, they'd find a way to transfer them to someone who's willing to make that investment, and some classic material would still be available.

Sure, there are holes in this you could fly a space shuttle through. But I do think we need to find a way to keep stuff from falling through the cracks and becoming unavailable just because someone, someday, *MIGHT* eventually want to bring it back into print.

If anyone actually buys one, please report back w/r/t the thread issue. (I'd order one for my girlfriend, but I'm on the wrong side of the puddle and don't want to deal with transatlantic shipping.)

#6: Followed, looked... I'm not seeing thread. May be my eyes, my monitor, or we may be interpreting details differently. Whatever, it's a nice little piece.

I've got a decent-sized shopping bag made of something like nylon fabric that folds into a flat package, with the leatherette bottom reinforcement folding over and zipping closed to become the case. Wish I could find a few more of those.

Are you sure they mean "stitch" as in "with thread" as opposed to "inserting tab A very fine and around slot 2"?

Low-res electromechanical pixel displays are common -- most new city busses and roadside displays have them (typically monochrome yellow/black; I've presumed some form of disk flipped with a magnet but I honestly don't know).

The challenge for those is making the pixels small enough, and responsive enough... and if you want more than on/off, coming up with something which supports intermediate shades.

The impressive thing about this watch is not just the size but that it is _fully_ mechanical. The linkages/cams which drive those segments must be entertaining; I'd love to see a blueprint.

#4: Good point. This does look like it started as an off-desk inbox that was repurposed when someone's cat discovered it.

Might work for cats that just want to keep you under surveilance. Cats do generally like elevated perches and being closer to your eye level.

On the other hand, it doesn't address what's usually the real issue: "Don't play with that; play with Cat!"

My solution was to declare the PC desk a "no cat" surface, like the kitchen table. She was welcome to lie on my lap and be a furry wrist rest, or to otherwise hang around and request some of my attention -- but the work surface was off limits. This requires that the human be completely consistent about the rule, but most cats have no trouble understanding "that's MY territory, get your fuzzy butt off it". Admittedly, some will continue to test the assertion, which is why it's so important to (re)enforce every time.

As Deteriorata put it, "Hire people with hooks."

Traditional suggestion to reject hardcopy replicas of fingerprints (or amputated fingers): run a few additional tests, such as checking for a pulse behind the fingerprint. It's still defeatable, but it raises the bar significantly.

There are multiple axes of security -- what you know (passwords), who you are (biometrics), what you possess (physical tokens such as keys), and so on. The ideal system would combine all of these, be highly resistant to forgery or bypassing or theft, yet be unobtrusive. That's a tall order, and security professionals in both the physical and data worlds have been working on it for centuries. Since it's an engineering question, it's unavoidably going to be something of an ongoing arms race.

I should point out that one can "change fingertips "-- by changing which finger is used to unlock a specific system, and having the others recorded as "abuse, call security guard to make this character explain himself"... Much like the use of "duress" combinations on some safes, which set off a silent alarm. A good system could index which fingertip is appropriate based on calendar or time or some similar criterion, combining the biometric aspect with a knowledge test.

Great. Embedded bloggers. Yet another opportunity to provide the appearance of greater access in exchange for the reality of greater control...

Uhm. Apparently the concept of privacy was a minor sociological ripple, lasting only for the brief period between when people became too many to keep track of and when technology enabled us to publicly embarass folks whether we know them or not.

I don't consider the revival of back-fence gossip -- with everyone sharing the same fence -- a particularly good thing. It may discourage folks from making some mistakes, but it also makes living those mistakes down rather difficult. Some youthful indiscretions really should be allowed to be forgotten, or at least not publicised.

I think we need a rule that says you can't post someone else's photos unless you're willing to make all your own embarassing moment available for public review.

(Though actually, what I expect is that whoever posted these will find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit -- no model release, no right to publish, and posting on the web is publication.)

But everyone knows botanists know more about black holes than the folks at CERN do, right?

(Instant Expert syndrome: I understand one thing and people respect me for it, therefore I know everything about everything. Alas, too many people -- authors, scientists, religious leaders, politicians, you name it -- seem to develop bad cases of this at some point in their career.)

I agree with the comments that this looks like a slow-frame-rate movie loop for the "resting" state -- hence the realism, since none of us ever hold completely still for long -- with a bit of dynamic editing to splice in frames for the mouse-tracking sequences.

I've seen it done before -- there was a version of Xeyes which used stored frames of its programmer. That implementation did something this one doesn't -- touch his nose and his eyes cross. It didn't have the resting loop, admittedly, but I saw that trick about a decade ago at SIGGRAPH if I remember correctly.

Cute, but worth an OMG? I don't think so. The fact that they're now programming resting/fidgeting loops into real animated characters, to automate some of their "personality" so the folks writing the motion script don't have to fill it all in manually, impresses me much more.

Oh, that's scary. Not just because I'm still a sucker for this sort of toy -- I have dreams of building my own kinetic sculpture some day -- but because this is smack dab in the middle of my natal culture. I remember looking very much like the lad in the ad.

Building it yourself: The drums are easy, of course. (They don't even have to be drums; bearings will bounce nicely off a hard metal surface too if you want a different sound, or a percussionist's practice pad might be worth trying for a quieter bounce.) Various simpler closed-loop ball-race toys are already on the market; might be easiest to cannibalize one of those for the motorized lift and possibly some other components (gather balls and then release as a group, for example) if you don't want to construct it yourself... though these shouldn't be hard to build either. The flag's a simple weight triggered latch, I presume, set to require some number of balls before it lets go.

Teresa@428: Some of us "intend to be people" but prefer to keep our identities on different systems separate rather than getting into "but over on XXX you said...." debates here or elsewhere. (I was posting anonymously for that reason, but decided I should give folks here at least some context.)

That doesn't necessarily invalidate the rest of your issues with Technogirl (who I have no connection with; there are just not that many suitably entertaining userIDs out there). I'm just quibbling with the assertion that someone who prefers an invented name is by definition malicious. Sometimes it's just a nickname.

For what it's worth, I've stopped reading most of the posts and started just scanning for new responses from Ye Honorable Moderator. That seems to be enough to let me judge the overall flow without having to wade in it.

I'd stop entirely, except that I've _been_ a moderator in the past on other systems and I'm curious about whether anyone can actually find anything new to say on the topic. So far, not so much.

(And yes, this probably counts as a meta-metatopic. Or maybe a control-meta topic, for those who remember the Bucky Bits.)

In addition to the personal pH issue -- It's interesting that the folks reporting this problem are mostly women despite the fact that keyboard use has become nearly gender-equalized. I find myself wondering whether the real problem is acetone from fingernail polish.

Having played Guidolon in a reading of the original script... Frank is a _warped_ individual, and I mean that as high praise.

I hate to post a Me Too, but in case anyone's counting... chalk me up on the "I approve" side. Perfectly reasonable policies... if anything, more lenient than I'd be comfortable administering.

Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns and operates one. Editorial policy is not censorship. If you can't live with the BB policy, you really should go find or start a group better suited to you needs.

(To the BB'ers: Illegitimi non carborundum and keep up the good work.)

Anyone know which team was responsible?

As the report says, artificial holes in the ground tend to fill up with water -- think about what that might have done to any rebar or other roof supports. DEFINITELY get expert evaluation from someone who really understands this kind of construction.

Also, if this sounds interesting, check your local geology -- there may not be silos in your area, but there may be inhabitable caves.

You should probably ignore mines, though -- they were generally not cut with the idea of lasting very long and they don't tend to be very stable. A natural cave which has lasted a few hundred (or thousand) years is much more likely to last another hundred.

And yes, I was tempted to buy a cave, some years ago... but came to the conclusion that while it was already closed off for use as secure storage, getting it plumbed and otherwise up to code requirements as a habitation was going to be much more work than I wanted to consider.

"Ooooh! _You've_ got a _sparkley_!"

I disagree with Eclectro -- though of course de gustibus non disputandum est. For me the aesthetics do work, especially when one looks at some of the details. I like the nonlinear coils, for example; they're just weird enough that they've got me thinking about what they could possibly be for.

Of course what this thing needs is a legend (in both senses) explaining what it *is* for.

I think Larry Niven summed it up when describing a spaceship module which combined "refresher" (ie, toilet) and food (re)synthesis, by saying that his character would have preferred "a less obvious connection".

The concept of reusing "grey water" to feed a flush toilet is entirely reasonable. But a separate tank with appropriate plumbing, while more expensive to retrofit, really would work better in this case.

At the very least, put the two back-to-back or side-by-side to address all the usage issues already cited. (Hm. Simply take existing washer, hook its drain into toilet tank, possibly improve the tank's overflow drainage... doesn't that do it just as well, with off-the-shelf parts?)

Issue: Clothes washer output is going to contain some lint and similar detritus. Might need to screen before reusing. Which means some hassle cleaning the screen. Oh well.

Note that dehumidifiers produce water which most of us currently just dump down the drain, and which will be relatively clean. Another good source of grey water, perhaps. Maybe we need a whole graded system -- dehumidifier feeds laundry, laundry and showers feed toilets... Probably too expensive while water prices remain cheap, but definitely worth considering where water is scarce.

This toy probably isn't much more than a gel cell, a fuse, _MAYBE_ a current limiting resistor, wire and connector. But hey, it does the job...

Looking at the profile: How long before someone uses that vehicle as the letter "G" in an ad?

(I wouldn't object to playing with one, but I really have no need to own one. No lasting interest in motor sports; give me sails and pedals.)

Well, that's the whole point of litigating, isn't it? His sound is part of his product, and he wants them to _buy_ the product (or at least license it) rather than swiping it.

Much as I hate look-and-feel lawsuits, and much as I hate the overextension of copyright/trademark, I do think that respect for living artists requires paying them when you use their work for commercial purposes. (I'd argue noncommercial too, but encourage the artists to waive the fee or make it minimal.)

My issues with copyright are more in the range of "If you aren't going to keep it in print, don't stand in the way of someone else who wants to do so."

Websearch says that spotted eagle rays are sometimes known as spotted stingrays, and that they do have stinging spines. So the (corrected) report isn't completely wrong, just less than precise.

Spotted eagle rays are beautiful and graceful creatures, when they aren't colliding with humans or objecting to being abused. Had the pleasure of swimming along with a smaller one, some years ago.

I suppose this incident is the nautical equivalent of having a deer leap out in front of your car -- it isn't entirely your fault, and isn't entirely the deer's fault, and it may not always be avoidable, but the result isn't good for anyone.

(Q: What do you get when you try to cross a deer with a Rabbit?
A: Venison and a totaled volkswagon.)

Actually, the Operation-style toy I really want to find was a "spy safe" someone was making which combined three different puzzles -- a dexterity challenge (trace your way around a maze, where touching the sides failed), a visual memory challenge (catch numbers as they flash by, re-enter them on a pad), and an audio acuity/memory challenge (match a sequence of tones)... at programmable levels of difficulty. Get all three right within time limits and the compartment opens; get any of the steps wrong and you lose. It's a good enough challenge that one of the local LARP groups has been using it as an in-game simulation of everything from safecracking to defusing a bomb.

Ah. I do stand corrected. Strikes me as a lot of money (scaled to the time) to spend for hazing... ignoring the suitability of hazing... but I suppose large groups could afford it and got sufficient entertainment/pay-it-forward revenge value out of it, given its reusability from year to year.

So it really is a low-tech mechanical bull equivalent. Probably intended to replace a time when the clueless newbies were strapped to real animals. I suppose it avoids cruelty-to-animals charges; it's just cruel to humans.

He will indeed be missed. For his social insight as well as his techical insight.

(Everyone remembers that he correctly predicted the geosynchronous communications satellite. Fewer remember that he also correctly predicted one of the "killer applications" for this, and for every new communications technology since then: pornography.)

"Is that a kiosk in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?"

It appears to be intended to buck as it rolls about, judging from the linkage. I'm guessing it's just a parade float, an early incarnation of the Shriners' funny cars better suited for a pastoral environment.

The best street art I've ever seen may not have been intended as such. There's a graffito on a signpost in the Boston area which says something to the effect of: "PAUL DONT TALK BILL IS DYING". (Misquoting from memory, but that's close enough for illustration.) It's been there for years now, and it still brings me to a full stop every time I see it.

You *HAVE* to stand there pondering what inspired someone to write this. Don't talk about what? Wasn't there a better way to get the message to Paul than to post it in public? Is this to protect Bill, to incriminate him, to protect or incriminate someone else?

Heck of a mystery in six small words. I wish I could write something half that powerful.

(Of course this _might_ be deliberate street art. If so, I'm impressed and would love to know who to credit.)