They're really pretty easy to keep at a good temperature, with modern heating - they do fine from the low seventies to the mid eighties. Where I am in Dallas, I don't find that I need an incubator, but some folks up north need something to keep them a little warmer.

I've been raising silkworms as a hobby since 2001, and I've got a rearing journal of them here: http://www.wormspit.com/bombyxsilkworms.htm

and the processing for silk is here:
http://www.wormspit.com/silkworkindex.htm
(scroll down, there's a video!)

I also run a Yahoo group for people who are interested in raising the worms: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/catherders/

Michael
http://www.wormspit.com

On the low-tech side, there's an artist's trick that helps with finding the relative colors and values of things... block the surrounding colored or shaded with your fingers, and you get a truer sense of what color the spot really is. It removes the context. It helps a lot in picking the right paint color. Some people even use a piece of cardstock with little holes cut out of it, and various shades or values surrounding it so that you can see where it falls. Like this: http://www.dickblick.com/zz049/47/

If you can hold up your fingers so that all you see is finger between the two pieces you're comparing, they're visibly identical.

Processing of cocoons for silk: http://www.wormspit.com/newreeling.htm
Most of the time, they're killed with hot dry air - by the time they hit the boiling water, they've been dead for a while.

The Ahimsa silk idea *sounds* great - but it just doesn't work out when you do the numbers. Sustaining the breed requires just a few moths per thousand to hatch - one moth will lay hundreds of eggs. For every extra moth that is allowed to hatch out and breed, there will be 200 - 500 larvae that will die, usually of starvation. You can't raise all of them.

Using the breeding cocoons from traditional silk operations (i.e., where the majority of the cocoons are killed for the silk) is laudable - but it's something that's been done all along, making a variety of different spun silks. I think that calling it "Peace Silk" and going on about how the cocoons weren't boiled, is just an exercise in making yourself feel good.

Eddie Lin of Deep End Dining has a good entry on live octopus tentacles, complete with video... he actually has to wrestle it out of his mouth at one point.