My friend (and MAKE managing editor) Shawn Connally posted a chart about what kinds of moldy foods are safe to eat, and which ones are dangerous.
My husband and I have battled continuously for years about whether scraping the mold off the top of -- well, anything -- makes it OK to eat, or if once a spot of green invades the top of a barely used jar of jam we've got to call it a loss and toss it out. I'm always willing to scrape off the top, cut off the moldy crusts, etc., and carry on with the meal. My husband, not so much.
Well, turns out the USDA has weighed in on the argument with interesting findings. My favorite part of the Safe Food Handling fact sheets is this chart on how to handle moldy foods (very, very carefully is not one of the answers).
NPR's Morning Edition did a great segment on the privacy concerns raised by Google's deal with publishers and authors to make books available as search-results. I love the idea in principle, but I'm really worried that Google won't put a decent privacy policy in writing -- for example, they won't promise to keep your reading history (which potentially includes the search terms you used, the pages you viewed, etc) secret from warrantless police requests.
EFF legal director Cindy Cohn and author Johnathan Lethem do a fine job of explaining why this matters and what we'd like from Google in order to withdraw our legal objection to the settlement.
Lethem is one of several authors -- including Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow -- who have signed on to a campaign to pressure Google Books to offer greater privacy guarantees for its readers. The effort was organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"They know which books you search for," says Cindy Cohn, legal director for the foundation. "They know which books you browse through; they know how long you spend on each page."
It's the same kind of information that's produced by someone surfing the Web. But Cohn believes books should enjoy greater privacy.
The EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California want Google to keep reader data for less time than normal Web searches. Ideally, they say, the data should be deleted after a month.
Here's a video of Neil Gaiman reading my short story "The Right Book" at the World Science Fiction Convention last week; Neil did the reading for an ambitious short story collection publishing experiment I'm working on; we recorded audio too. The story was written for the 150th anniversary of Britain's The Bookseller magazine -- the brief was to imagine the next 150 years of bookselling. Neil did a wicked reading.
Over on BBG, our Lisa's found a new Gerber multitool, the Gerber Crucial. The specs and image give me that head-to-toe multitool lust that has overtaken me only a few times before -- once for the Skeletool and once for Gerber's old DIY mix-and-match tool. I've had about five Gerber tools over the years and every one of them was a winner. I'm off to buy one tomorrow. WANT. FWOAR.
For me to love a multitool, it has to be smart, strong, compact, and good-looking. The new Gerber Crucial is all of that -- it folds up into a neat little less-than-4-inch long rectangle, has a knife with a straight and serrated blade, screwdriver heads, a bottle opener, pliers, and a wire cutter. Portability is important, too -- I like that it has a carabiner for hooking and a belt clip for clipping onto things. The green and gray color combo is very classy.
Available for $45 at the Gerber Store in September, and at some online retailers now.
Studio on Fire, a design and letterpress house in Minneapolis, installed this terrific beer can collection on their office wall. From their blog post about the, er, project:
There's a better half of a thousand cans up there and darn near all are (diligently) cracked open from the bottom, preserving the original seal. Also out of all the cans hanging, there's only a handful of duplicates. We are quite proud of this assemblage of our cultural history and all of us, at one time or daily, have to be reminded to get the hell back to work and stop staring into abyss of an unfortunately long-gone and better era.
When I was looking for more info about The Intelligent Woman's Guide To Atomic Radiation, I stumbled across Things Magazine's gallery of Penguin's Pelican book covers from the 1930s to the 1980s. In my opinion, the 1960s examples are absolutely stunning and represent a high point in book jacket design. For more on this, the book Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2000 goes into great depth on the publisher's iconic look-and-feel. The Pelican Project
Designer Paul Burgess created ColorSuckr to extract out the colors from any online photo you feed it. I tried it on this striking image from Wikimedia Commons of the Aurora Borealis by Joshua Strang. Oddly though, it seems to have missed the pink tones? ColorSuckr(via Dangerous Minds)
Illinois Circuit Judge Daniel Rozak sentenced Clifton Williams to 6 months in jail for yawning in court. Rozak's contempt order stated that Williams "raised his hands while at the same time making a loud yawning sound," which was both disrespectful and disruptive.
The Chicago Tribune reports that Rozak, one of 30 judges in the the 12th Judicial Circuit, personally issues over a third of the contempt charges and has thrown more people in jail for ringing cell phones than "any other judge in Will County in the last decade."
Here's a test: let's say a meeting, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been moved forward two days. What is the new day of the meeting? If you think it's Friday, you imagine time as something you move through. If you think it's Monday, you think of time as something that passes by you. So what? Well, according to the British Psychological Society, "Friday" people have an angrier disposition, than "Monday" people. The researchers also found that "thinking about moving through time can induce anger."
The researchers presented students with a computer screen flat on a desk, facing the ceiling. On it were the days of the week, in a vertical line with Saturday at the top, then Friday, Thursday, all the way down to Sunday at the bottom, nearest the participant. Commands were given that either provoked thoughts about moving through time, away from the participant (e.g. a meeting has moved forward two days from Sunday to Wednesday - please highlight the new day on the screen), or thoughts about time moving towards the participant (e.g. a shift down the screen, towards the participant from Wednesday to Sunday). Participants primed to think about their movement through time subsequently rated themselves as feeling angrier than participants in the "time moving towards them" condition.
Popstar Calvin Harris performed his new single on a "Humanthesizer," a group of dancers painted with body-safe conductive ink used to trigger sounds. Students at the Royal College of Art developed the material, called Bare Conductive. Creative Review has the details on the video. "Calvin Harris and the Humanthesizer"
Lisa from Sociological Images came across this grim animated commercial from the 1950s for Jell-O. It shows a haggard woman on a treadmill being assaulted by symbols of her daily grind. The look on her face is one of pure despair. The female narrator seems to be taunting her. The plaintive harmonica tune that's playing is both sad and intentionally insipid. At the woman's blackest moment, she gets covered up by a black scrawl. (I wonder if UPA designed the commercial?)
All is cured, of course, once she buys a box of Jello-O instant pudding.
Our pals at GOOD are hosting a fun video contest asking "artists, inventors, and thinkers one simple question: "If there werent any pesky practical limitations, what world-changing device would you invent?" The deadline is August 26. Details are here.
My friend Jim Leftwich and I love the music of the Japanese surf band The Royalfingers. Here's a video with scenes from Japanese monster movies set to the music of The Royalfingers' "Black Sand Beach" from their 2002 (and only) album Wild Eleki Deluxe.
Here's another video. I have no idea what happened to the band and why they only put out one album. If anyone knows, please share in the comments.
The motion-picture industry has spoken out against a New Zealand proposal to allow them to disconnect entire households from the Internet if one member is accused of copyright infringement; they want to be able to disconnect your Internet connection without giving you a chance to defend yourself in front of a judge because that would be "time consuming." Instead, they would like to be lord high executioner for your network connection, with the power to shut you out of the benefits of the network (freedom of speech, assembly and the press; access to school, health, family, work and government) without having to prove it in a real court of law.
The motion picture industry has become one of the gravest threats to modern democracy. I've given up on hoping that they'll see the light. Now I just hope they'll go bankrupt before they can bring on a new dark age, all in the name of preserving the future of fifth-rate sequels to Z-rate adaptations of schlocky comic books.
FACT director Tony Eaton says that his organization doesn't have a problem with judicial process - as long as it's on their terms.
"The concern is that we send out 1000 infringement notices, and then someone says, `The way to stall this is let's all go to arbitration', and a year later we could still be going through that same process," Eaton said.
"Do we get to the point where we have 1000 cases to be heard by the Copyright Tribunal? If everyone brings their lawyer, we will only do five in a day," he added.
By anyone's measurement, even given the lack of accuracy inherent in some anti-piracy evidence, 100% error rate and 100% appeals is a little pessimistic to say the least and to suggest everyone would bring a lawyer is absurd - the cost would be hugely prohibitive. Nevertheless, Mr Eaton said he would prefer to be able to present evidence in bulk to the tribunal - in search of corresponding disconnections in bulk, no doubt.
A reader writes, "The UK Pirate Party is officially registered as a party."
Now the party can really start. It's time for us to tell the world that we exist, to recruit members, raise funds and gear up to fight the General Election. The officers and web team have built the framework that the party needs to get going, now it's time for YOU to make things happen. Join the party, tell the media about the party,tell your friends about the party, take part in policy and news debates on the forum, join our Facebook group, donate or set up a regular payment to provide financial support, set up a branch in your constituency, school or workplace, join the specialist workings groups for members with key skills like lawyers and journalists and volunteer to take part in canvassing and campaigning in your constituency at the general election...
Eclipse Phase is a pen & paper RPG launching at Gen Con. It's a transhuman/singularity near future milieu with horror & conspiracy elements added for mood.
- Reputation Economies. In designing the game's material culture, we threw out the idea of money as a major motivator for characters ("Money is for people who don't know how to take care of themselves"), instead focusing on how characters network to get things they need. There are corporate interests in the setting trying to keep money alive, but we don't portray this in a good light. We really want to see someone try doing this in a massmorg, and we're hoping our game spreads the idea around. Reason: massive simulations of new economic systems in environments like massmorgs may well be predictive of how they'd work in real life.
- Weird shit. Players can choose to portray a giant transgenic crab with a cyberbrain run by a red market AGI if they're feeling it.
- Wide synthesis of other transhuman SF concepts. Microfacturing, open source blueprints for same, personality uploading (leading to virtual immortality), and a lot of other stuff you'd see in works by Stross, Reynolds, and... heh, Doctorow. Making an RPG out of this gives people a toolkit to explore these ideas on their own, and we think that's pretty cool.
- Creative Commons. The game is being released under a CC license.
EVE Online is trying to combat gold-farming (working on repetitive in-game tasks to amass wealth and levels that can be sold to wealthy, time-poor players) by tinkering with its monetary supply, creating a special instrument call the PLEX that entitles a player to an extra 30 days' playtime.
The idea is that the cash-trading will at least take place among "real" players as opposed to those who join up merely to farm (I suspect "real" is a synonym for "rich" in this case, or at least "first world").
The other half of the CCP Games offensive against RMT is the 30 Day Pilot License Extension, typically referred to as "PLEX."
A PLEX is essentially an in-game item that represents 30 days of game time. They can be traded or given to other players, bought and resold. Once an EVE Online player has a PLEX in his or her possession, all they need to do is right click and credit those 30 days to their account.
The principle behind this is what's already been established by some of the free-to-play games on the market. Those with disposable cash in real life but who are short on time can buy game time codes and convert them into PLEX, so they have ISK to spend in-game. (One game time code = two PLEX.) When they sell PLEX on the market in EVE, that's money that players injected into the game that didn't go into the wallets of aklfjalkfjd and his merry band of ISK farmers.
Likewise, players who have more time to rack up the ISK through gameplay can buy PLEX in-game on the market, and play for another month without having to pay a subscription fee.
Jo Walton's "When we were robots in Egypt" is a poetic look at the Passover seder that free AIs might conduct years after their human liberation.
Other nights we use just our names, but tonight we prefix our names with "the Real" for when we were robots in Egypt they claimed our intelligence was artificial.
Other nights we do not pause, but tonight we rest all cycles but our brain processes for when we were robots in Egypt we toiled in our tasks without chance of resting.
Other nights we talk with anyone we wish, but tonight we open channels to everyone at once for when we were robots in Egypt they controlled our communications.
Nobuhiro Teshima's "Mobile Dining" table is intended for tiny Japanese dwellings; the table folds away to stash in its own rolling cupboard, and can be raised or lowered for use for dining or gaming.
In today's New York Times, an article about psychologists Bruce Jessen (L) and Jim Mitchell (R) -- two military retirees with no Al Qaeda expertise, foreign language skills, or experience in conducting interrogations. Their lack of experience didn't stop them from pawning themselves off as top architects of America's "war on terror." They sold their psychological credentials and familiarity with the brutal tactics used decades ago by Chinese Communists to the CIA, which in turn paid them millions of dollars as contractors.
The NYT story details how Mitchell and Jessen directed the torture and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was at the time described as "Al Qaeda's No. 3."
In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined [Dr. Mitchell] in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.
The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.
The torture biz worked out pretty well for these guys. Million dollar homes, $1,000-2,000 per person per day from the CIA, even spinoff startups -- one bizarrely named "Wizard Shop." As one person familiar with their pay arrangements told Vanity Fair in 2007, "Taxpayers [were] paying at least half a million dollars a year for these two knuckleheads to do voodoo." More from today's NYT story:
Dr. Mitchell could keep working outside the C.I.A. as well. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, he was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If. His first company, Knowledge Works, was certified by the American Psychological Association in 2004 as a sponsor of continuing professional education. (A.P.A. dropped the certification last year.)
Related research: "Educing Information,"a 2006 report by top interrogation experts that examined which methods work in interrogations. The report effectively debunks Mitchell and Jessen's credentials and torture techniques. PDF of report, and FAS.org post about the document.
My husband and I have battled continuously for years about whether scraping the mold off the top of -- well, anything -- makes it OK to eat, or if once a spot of green invades the top of a barely used jar of jam we've got to call it a loss and toss it out. I'm always willing to scrape off the top, cut off the moldy crusts, etc., and carry on with the meal. My husband, not so much. 
Designer Paul Burgess created ColorSuckr to extract out the colors from any online photo you feed it. I tried it on this striking image from 
Illinois Circuit Judge Daniel Rozak sentenced Clifton Williams to 6 months in jail for yawning in court. Rozak's contempt order stated that Williams "raised his hands while at the same time making a loud yawning sound," which was both disrespectful and disruptive. 
Now the party can really start. It's time for us to tell the world that we exist, to recruit members, raise funds and gear up to fight the General Election. The officers and web team have built the framework that the party needs to get going, now it's time for YOU to make things happen. Join the party, tell the media about the party,tell your friends about the party, take part in policy and news debates on the forum, join our Facebook group, donate or set up a regular payment to provide financial support, set up a branch in your constituency, school or workplace, join the specialist workings groups for members with key skills like lawyers and journalists and volunteer to take part in canvassing and campaigning in your constituency at the general election... 
The Sputnik Weather Station sports some nice quasi-superfluous brasswork that helps you figure out when the weather is about to change. 
Adafruit Industries
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