Four short links: 8 October 2009

DIY Baby Rocker, Unix Systems Glory, Encrypting Ephemera, and Explaining Creative Joy

1. Linux Baby Rocker -- inventive use of a CD drive and the eject command ... (via Hacker News)
2. I Like Unicorn Because It's Unix -- forceful rant about the need to rediscover Unix systems programming. Reminds me of the Varnish notes where the author explains that it works better because it uses the operating system instead of recreating it poorly.
3. Encrypting Ephemeral Storage and EBS Volumes on Amazon -- step-by-step instructions. (via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
4. You Have No Life -- if a video smacks even slightly of concentrated effort or advance planning, someone will inevitably scoff that the subject has a) "too much time on his hands" or b) "no life." Ten times out of ten. [...] After six years I lack a succinct, meaningful response to my students' defensive, clannish embrace of mediocrity, though I'm grateful for this tweet, which comes pretty close: dwineman: You say "looks like somebody has too much time on their hands" but all I hear is "I'm sad because I don't know what creativity feels like."

Four short links: 11 September 2009

Healthcare Fellow, Javascript Math, Web PDF Viewer, Tweeting Kegerator

1. Healthspottr Fellow -- outstanding entrepreneurs will be awarded prizes of up to $250,000 to accelerate their innovative endeavours. Think MacArthur Genius Grant for healthcare. (via Gov 2.0 Summit)
2. jsMath -- Javascript for embedding Math in web pages. (via Hacker News)
3. Google's Undocumented Embeddable PDF Viewer -- Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online. (via Waxy)
4. Tweeting Kegerator -- network connected keg that tells you when it's about to run out.

Four short links: 9 September 2009

SMS Data Collection, Love of Math, Anti-File Sharing Rubbish, Open Manufacturing

1. RapidSMS -- a free and open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology. UNICEF's mobile data collection framework, as used in Malawi and other proving grounds. (via gov2expo)
2. Groceries -- read this and you will realize that Dan Meyer is the math teacher you wish you'd had. He has the geek nature, and his excitement must be great for his students. The express lane isn't faster. The manager backed me up on this one. You attract more people holding fewer total items, but as the data shows above, when you add one person to the line, you're adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that's "tender time" added to "other time") without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you'd rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person! I can't believe I'm dropping exclamation points in an essay on grocery shopping but that's how this stuff makes me feel.
3. How the UK Government Spun 136 People into 7 Million -- a radio show looked into the government's claim of 7 million illegal filesharers and discovered it came down to 136 people in a survey admitting they'd used it. (via br3nda)
4. Idle Speculation on the shan zhai and Open Fabrication (Tom Igoe) -- shan zhai have established a culture of sharing information about the things they make through open BOMs (bills of materials) and other design materials, crediting each other with improvements. The community apparently self-polices this policy, and ostracizes those that violate it. Open hardware, business, recovery, and more in this fascinating speculation.

Four short links: 19 August 2009

Survivor Bias, Algorithmic Trading, S3 Tools, DIY GSM

1. Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias -- "Burying the other evidence: [...] Doesn't most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School's famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can learn from Starbucks's success? (via Hacker News)
2. A Bestiary of Algorithmic Trading Strategies -- insight into the algorithms used by quant traders. Statistical arbitrageurs are a sort of squishy area, similar to arbs, but distinct from them. They find “pieces” of securities which are theoretically equivalent. For example, they may notice a drift between prices of oil companies which should revert to a mean value. This mean reversion should happen if the drift doesn’t have anything to do with actual corporate differences, like one company’s wells catching on fire. What you’re doing here is buying and selling the idea of an oil company, or in other words, a sort of oil company market spread risk. You’re assuming these two companies are statistically the same, and so they’ll revert to some kind of mean when one of the prices move. (via Hacker News)
3. s3cmd -- commandline tool for moving files into and out of Amazon S3.
4. DIY GSM Network -- wow. How to build your own GSM network. Bit by bit, the telcos are getting pressured by the hobbyists. This barbarian is looking forward to the day when the walled gardens are sacked. (via Slashdot)

Four short links: 22 July 2009

Augmented Reality, A/B Psych, Open Source Heartbeat, Launchpad Launches

1. ARtisan -- AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson)
2. How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% -- A/B testing from 37Signals showed that "See Plans and Pricing" got twice the clickthroughs of "Free Trial!" and variations thereon. (via kathysierra on Twitter)
3. Open Source Heart Monitor, Possible Blood Sugar Level Detector -- another step forward in sensor networks and personal data: I’ve set up a quick prototype of a device that will monitor my heart rate while I sleep. It includes a BUGbase + BUGvonHippel module (from my company Bug Labs). I’m also using a custom module we put together that uses a Polar radio receiver (from Sparkfun) and a Polar strap that I wear around my chest. Lastly, we wrote a simple program that runs on the BUG to log the data. (via chr1a on Twitter)
4. Launchpad Opensourced -- Canonical's code hosting and collaboration platform that was heavily lusted after in the open souce world, finally open sourced and in its entirety. GNU Affero license.

Four short links: 16 July 2009

Transparency Camp, Wasted Time, Advertising Hypocrisy, Maker Skills

1. Transparency Camp West -- a few more slots left for Google-hosted Aug 8 and 9 Bar Camp on open government.
2. Meeting Ticker -- count the cost of a meeting in real time, just enter the number of people, the time it started, and the average salary. (via make on Twitter)
3. More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines -- Tellingly, ad companies don't run ads for their products. "[W]e haven't bought a single ad in support of any of our brands. Not one. Why would we? You can do so much if you know what you're doing with product placement, sponsorship, digital PR. It's that whole "I haven't got any money, so I'll have to think." It makes you much better at grinding out media without paying. (via someone on Twitter, apologies for forgetting whom)
4. 18 Essential Skills for a Maker -- 13. Strip, splice, and terminate wire- Trickier than it sounds. You should be able to splice wire using a crimp splice, a wire nut, and heat shrink + solder (note: electrical tape is NOT on that list). You should know how to use a wire stripper to strip stranded wire without cutting more than one or two strands. You should be able to attach a wire to your project in such a way that it will still be attached in two weeks, two months, or two years. (via Makezine)

Time Lapse of Galactic Center of Milky Way rising over Texas Star Party

According to William Castleman: The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

[via the Primary Tentacle @ Laughing Squid]

Four short links: 12 May 2009

Storage Superfluity, Data-Driven Design, Twit-Mapping, and DIY Biohacking

1. Lacie 10TB Storage -- for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you've stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap and terabyte drive full of downloaded crap. Do we need to keep it? Are there psychological consequences to clutter? (via gizmodo)
2. In Defense of Data-Driven Design -- a thoughtful response to the "Google hates design!" hashmob formed around designer Douglas Bowman's departure from Google. When you’ve got the enormous traffic necessary to work out if miniscule changes have some minor, statistically significant effect, then sure, if you can do it quickly, why wouldn’t you? But that’s optimization that should happen at the very end of the design cycle. The cart goes after the horse. Put it the other way ‘round and you have a broken setup. It doesn’t mean horses suck. It doesn’t mean carts suck. Carts are not the enemy of horses. Optimization is not the enemy of design. Get them in the right order and you have something really useful. Get them the wrong way around and you have something broken.
3. Just Landed: Processing + Twitter + Metacarta + Hidden Data -- Jer searched Twitter for "just landed in", used Metacarta to extract the locations mentioned, and then used Processing to build visualizations.
4. Do It Yourself Genetic Sleuthing -- MIT is starting a hotbed of DIY biologists. The 23-year-old MIT graduate uses tools that fit neatly next to her shoe rack. There is a vintage thermal cycler she uses to alternately heat and cool snippets of DNA, a high-voltage power supply scored on eBay, and chemicals stored in the freezer in a box that had once held vegan "bacon" strips. Aull is on a quirky journey of self-discovery for the genetics age, seeking the footprint of a disease that can be fatal but is easily treated if identified. But her quest also raises a broader question: If hobbyists working on computers in their garages can create companies such as Apple, could genetics follow suit? It's unclear what those DIY-started "genetics" companies would look like--the potential is there, but it's yet to met the right problem. (via Andy Oram)

Just Landed - 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

Four short links: 30 Apr 2009

Youth, Government, Tween Arduino Hackers, and Table Slurpage

1. Ypulse Conference -- conference on marketing to youth with technology, from the very savvy Anastasia Goodstein who runs the interesting Ypulse blog on youth culture that I've raved about before. Register with the code RADAR for a 10% discount (thanks, Anastasia!).
2. Government in the Global Village -- departing post by the NZ CIO (and Kiwi Foo Camper) Laurence Millar. The principles here are applicable to almost every nation. We need to recognise the network effects of opening up government data in a form that means others can access it. Economic value is created by businesses building innovative new services using government data. Public value is created by enabling a richer and deeper understanding and dialogue among interested individuals about what the data tells us about our lives.[...] The legal, policy, and moral position is clear - New Zealanders own the data, having paid for its collection through taxes. These “problems” will all be solved by the community, and our role as government is to give priority to this. These efforts are stuff that matters. See also Google adds search to public data.
3. Children's Arduino Workshop (Makezine) -- video of three eleven-year old girls working on an Arduino project, and should be inspiration to anyone who has ever wanted to work on hardware projects with kids. Whoever did it succeeded in making it fun! (via followr on Twitter)
4. With YQL Execute, The Internet Becomes Your Database -- YQL is a query language for Yahoo! data sources, and now they've added a server-side Javascript way to import your own web page's tables into YQL. YQL and Pipes are turning into very interesting pieces of infrastructure (e.g., Museum Pipes blog). (via Simon Willison and straup on delicious)

Four short links: 21 Apr 2009

Space arrays, mobile hell, book scanners, and open source brains:

1. Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (Wired) -- Satellite hackers in Brazil are bouncing ham signals off a disused US military satellite array. Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations. [...] "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil." As William Gibson said, "the street finds its own uses for things." One man's space junk is another man's Make project. (via BoingBoing)
2. My Students, My Cellphone, My Ordeal -- there's probably a market selling lightweight forensic tools to schools, specifically to avoid scenarios like this poor man's.
3. DIY High Speed Book Scanner From Trash and Cheap Cameras (Instructables) -- $300 of parts gets you a reasonably high-quality scanner. It doesn't have an automatic page turner, but it's still a step up on "open the scanner lid, change the page, close the lid, hit scan, wait, [repeat until braindead]". We have a huge legacy of analog, and we're going to need consumer-grade consumer-priced systems if we are to rip-mix-burn our cultural legacy. What would the Google Books settlement look like if we all had high-speed scanners to do to our bookshelves what iTunes did to our CD shelves? (via BoingBoing)
4. OpenCog Brainwave Projects in Google's Summer of Code -- in case you think GSoC is all about GNOME apps getting alternate shortcuts for DVORAK keyboards, there's some esoteric stuff being approved. I wish that when I was a college student someone had paid me to work on a Application of Pleasure Algorithm Project.

Four short links: 20 Mar 2009

Space, Space, Micromanufacturing, and Sensors:

1. Teens Capture Images of Space With £56 Camera and Balloon (Telegraph) -- DIY/MAKE culture at its best, four 18-19 year old Spanish students (with guidance of a teacher) rigged a balloon to carry a camera over 100,000 feet (that's twelve trillion and seven Canadian meters) above the earth, take pictures, and return to the ground. Here's their project's web page with a Google gadget to translate it into English. (via @erikapearson)
2. The Robot Who Helps Astronomers Identify Stars - IO9 interviewed Fiona Romeo, about the Royal Observatory's Astronomical Photograph of the Year contest and the astrotagging bot I linked to earlier.
3. Clive Thompson on the Revolution in Micromanufacturing -- talks about his experiences with Etsy. I was aware of the site but had dismissed it as some sort of urban-hipster thing—until I started seeing chatter about it on discussion boards for wealthy professionals and stay-at-home moms.
4. How The FitBit Algorithms Work -- The Fitbit’s primary method of collecting data is an accelerometer. Its accelerometer constantly measures the acceleration of your body and algorithms convert this raw data into useful information about your daily life, such as calories burned, steps, distance and sleep quality. How do we develop these algorithms? Our approach is that we have test subjects wear the Fitbit while also wearing a device that produces a “truth” value. [...].

Four short links: 28 Jan 2009

Sensors, games, recession indicators, and book prep in today's four short links:

1. New Networks Take Nature's Pulse - an article in Christian Science Monitor about sensor networks. Makezine pointed out that hobbyists are building low-cost versions with Arduinos. Sensor networks are part of the "Web meets World" change we're in, where the Web ceases to be something you sit down to interact with. Instead, our everyday life will inform and be informed by the Web in ways we won't realize.
2. Interactive Fiction Goes to Market - a company, Textfyre is readying new text adventure games ("interactive fiction") for the iPhone market. I dream of a day when the text adventure world becomes lucrative again (the tools like Inform are divine) but I can't help think that the iPhone is the wrong platform. The make-believe keyboard makes text entry such a chore that it would seem to count against text adventures. I hope and wish that I am proven wrong and some day the CEO of Textfyre buys the house next to me just so he can build a huge mansion and paint on the walls "Nat Torkington thought the iPhone was the wrong platform for text adventures".
3. You Know It's a Recession When More People Search for Coupons Than Britney Spears - interesting tidbit from Bo Cowgill, who runs Google's internal prediction market. His blog is full of fascinating pointers to prediction market research. Between him and David Pennock, my prediction market cup runneth over.
4. How To Write a Book - Steven Johnson writes, on BoingBoing, how he uses DevonThink to gather and organize his book thoughts and structure before actually sitting down to produce the words. I love reading about the act of literary creation (I have a long shelf of "how to write mystery novel" books that I can almost quote chapter and verse), the way it's so different for every author yet so the output is so similar.

Four short links: 16 Jan 2009

Toys, telegraphs, transparency, and travel in today's roundup of short interesting links.

1. New Law Could Wipe Out Handcrafted Toy Makers - CNN story on a new consumer safety law that mandates expensive quality tests for components of toys, even those handmade in the US by micro-businesses. It's not clear what a solution looks like: mass-produced in China or micro-produced in the USA, a lead-filled toy is still unsafe. However, if the cost of proving safety prevents safe toys from reaching the market, the consumer has lost. I wonder what Make and Craft have to say about it.
2. Bio of Samuel Morse - he was more interesting than I realized. He also came up in Andy Kessler's How We Got Here, which I just finished reading and thoroughly enjoyed. See also Steven Johnson's guest post Joseph Priestley and the Open Flow of Ideas on BoingBoing. Understand the history of technology if you wish to understand its future.
3. Ze Frank's Explicit - a serious blog by Ze, where he talks about how he does what he does. I had always thought of Ze as a funny guy, based on his video podcasts, but when I met him at Foo Camp I realized he was a performer. George Clooney isn't a bankrobber like Danny Ocean. Sarah Michelle Gellar doesn't slay vampires like Buffy does. Miley Cyrus isn't a teen musical superstar like Hannah Mon... ok, some actors are like their characters, but most aren't. Ze takes performance seriously whether it's on the web, on video, in person, or on Twitter--he consciously approaches it as a task, and deliberately chooses how he does it. Think of this as "Inside the Actor's Studio" for the Internet age.
4. The Dopplr Personal Annual Report - a beautiful PDF report of your travel, automatically generated using the Prawn PDF library. Their sample travel report is that of Barack Obama. Internet businesses are able to capture lots more data than was possible in the past, and one way they differentiate themselves is by reflecting it back in useful and beautiful ways.

Four short links: 9 Jan 2009

Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what's the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark?

1. End Times - gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism (e.g., Bad News, Good News). The critical problem is still how to pay for journalism if the new media revenues are significant lower than old, and if the new media economics decree that journalism is dead then who fills the social good role that journalism's death will leave?
2. Ward Cunningham's Visible Workings - an intriguing glimpse, from March last year, into the way Ward lays out web interactions. Nice system for laying out these interactions, but it's also fascinating for how it makes transparent what will happen as a result of the data you submit. How scalable is this? Could it tackle privacy?
3. Project Euler - fun programming exercises that require more than math to finish. We learn by doing, not by reading, so interesting exercises are part and parcel of training. It's interesting to see educators are moving from being authors to being game designers, providing a series of staged challenges that make us stronger by defeating them. I'm presently dieing in as many ways as I can while learning iterators and generators in Python, as a way of ensuring I have Python's "game physics" sussed.
4. Rise of the Garage Genome Hackers - more on hobbyist molecular biology. It mentions DIYBio, the Cambridge biohacker collective that I first heard about at BioBarCamp. (via Glynn Moody)

The Visible Hand

I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon.

As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and Asia. Like many people, I’m incredulous. How could this happen?

Wall Street hired the best and the brightest, paid them handsomely, and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away, astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation, not production. Their models based on historical data predicted future profits, not collapse. Few people saw this coming until it hit.

“It was the triumph of data over common sense,” said reporter Adam Davidson on the excellent episode of This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money.” Economist Michael Lehmann in the San Francisco Chronicle called it “the triumph of ideology over common sense.” It’s obvious both common sense and the common man have taken a beating.

It’s hard to stomach that our government must bail out Wall Street. It really means we’ve bet our future on the same people who created the present situation. To paraphrase a joke I’ve heard: It’s like going to a casino in Vegas and rooting for the house. One New York Times reader expressed the frustration that many feel: “Why can’t we take half of the $700 billion and just build something?”

These events shake our belief that free markets work to the benefit of all. The fundamental tenet of capitalism is the “invisible hand”: Adam Smith wrote that “by pursuing his own interest [each person] frequently promotes that of the society.” This year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism — it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable.”

A headline in the Christian Science Monitor says: “With finance crisis, hands-off era over.” Government will need to be more assertive in regulating Wall Street. But I think it goes beyond that. I wonder if we, as individuals, have been living in our own era of hands-off. Have Americans become so disengaged that we’ve become dependent on some invisible force to provide what we need? Have we gotten used to leaving important matters to experts, until they turn out to be wrong?

Isn’t it time for us to become hands-on again?

We, the people, face enormous challenges. Apart from the economic mess, we know fundamental changes are coming because of global warming. Our dependence on fossil fuels is not sustainable. Change is coming, whether we want it or not.

Better we meet the challenges head-on rather than hide. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed it up: “We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a ‘liar loan.’ ... The American Dream is an aspiration, not an entitlement.”

We have to believe it starts with each of us — not some faceless government or corporate bureaucracy. It’s time for us, individually and working together in business, to reconsider what it means to be productive, not just profitable. It’s time for us to reengage in how our government sets priorities for education, health care, housing, and transportation.

The DIY mindset celebrated in this magazine must again become an essential life skill, rooted once again in necessity and practicality. Our future security lies in knowing what we’re capable of creating, and how we can adapt to change by being resourceful.

A challenge this great can bring out the best in us. We need everyone, because every person has something to contribute. We need a showing of all hands.

Auckland University Bioengineering Institute

I am an industry advisor to the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute and got a tour on Tuesday. It was inspirational! They sprawl over several floors of a tall concrete building in Auckland, expanding from their cramped one-floor presence. Everywhere you look there are people with soldering irons, laptops, and batteries working on devices that sit between hardware and biology.

I've been advising on their Physiome project, which seeks to computationally model human bodies at various levels including genes, proteins, muscles, skeleton, and skin. The idea is to develop a model such that you can "sample" a person's key physical trait, plug it into the model, and predict the details of their body's structure and response. I like to think of it as the OSI 7-layer stack of the human body.

You can see a list of their projects online. I saw the telemetry group's work on powering heart pumps, which assist a failing heart while the patient waits for a transplant. At the moment, heart pump patients have power cables sticking out of their chest and consequently many die from infection before they can receive the transplant. The telemetry group is working on wireless power transfer to the devices. It's the same inductive power ideas that made a splash last month when Intel demoed wireless power devices at their developers forum.

I also saw a lot of very sexy hardware. They have a 3D printer, a laser cutter, and a monstrously heavy metal machining tool that had to be delivered through the window by a crane (and which required multiple engineering checks of the floor's capability to hold it up). All these take designs from CAD diagrams, so the researchers can conceive of a part, design it, and produce it without the lengthy turnaround times and erratic tolerances of traditional machine shops. They're actively expanding their metal shop.

I also saw an artificial muscle in the biomimetics group. It was flapping at an adjustable rate, needing a high-voltage low-current power which can be made quite small and efficient. They were still trying to find an application--candidates they're investigating include moving small devices (the way some organisms use cilia to move around), and using may of them to form a crowd-surfing type of conveyor belt (pictured).

They have programmers, too—modelling is a big part of their work, and every model needs lots of sexy outputs. One of their coders, Duane Malcolm, came to Kiwi Foo earlier this year. He's an open source hacker, with Sparkfun Arduino kits at home, who has been hacking in XUL, RDF databases and Ruby on Rails lately. I didn't get to meet the programmer beside him, but she had a copy of one of O'Reilly's Python books on her desk—good to see!

I realize medical devices aren't new, but underlying these medical devices are sophisticated models and a lot of computational crunching. It reinforced for me the revelation I had at Science Foo Camp in August—science has always had theoreticians and experimentalists, but the days of being primarily one or the other have passed in many fields. Increasingly we're seeing a new class of data crunching scientist, someone who can make sense of the enormous volumes of data that can now be gathered, someone who connects theory and practice with software. There's a lot of that at the Bioengineering Institute and it was very exciting to see up-close and personal.

Why We're Failing in Math and Science

Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone.

In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and science with a few simple stories.

Last week, Robert Bruce Thompson, author of An Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, wrote a guest blog post on makezine.com, Home Science Under Attack, which told the sad story of how a retired chemist was arrested and his lab confiscated because he was doing experiments:

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents. Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's not accused of aiding terrorists, synthesizing explosives, nor even of making illegal fireworks. Deeb fell afoul of the Massachusetts authorities for ... doing experiments.

Authorities concede that the chemicals found in Deeb's basement lab were no more hazardous than typical household cleaning products. Despite that, authorities confiscated "all potentially hazardous chemicals" (which is to say the chemicals in Deeb's lab) from his home, and called in a hazardous waste cleanup company to test the chemicals and clean up the lab.

Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for Marlboro, stated, "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation."

Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman's words into plain English: "Mr. Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals..."

I forwarded this message to Dave Farber's IP list (which is now searchable via markmail, the amazing mailing list search engine!), and got back some great stories that I wanted to share.

Armando Stettner wrote one story that illustrates just how much our culture has changed. His story also involves the cops, but here, they understand and support science. Too bad that was 40+ years ago:

When I was about 13 or so, I also had a chemistry set in my basement. I was living on Long Island - Freeport, to be exact. I also remember the hobby shop with ALL sorts of glassware and little labeled bottles of chemicals. I had some really neat stuff: all sorts of chemicals - I seem to remember potassium ferrocyanide with which I did some chemoluminescence (I think that's one of the ingredients), sodium in liquid form, various acids, a few rolls of magnesium - not to mention all the paraphernalia: lots of pyrex stuff, triple beam balances, etc. All the chemicals were neatly arranged in this cabinet.

One day, I had mixed a concoction and was carrying it (premixed!) in a tin coffee can. Myself and a friend were carrying the stuff to the train tracks to test it out (light it) where it was relatively safe. The stuff started getting warm but I thought it was the sun heading the can up. Then it started getting REALLY warm. As it got hot, I dropped it in the middle of the street. The stuff flashed over. It was VERY cool.

But, I decided I didn't want to stay around any more and left.

Unfortunately for me, this all occurred in front of the house of someone who knew me (she was a 'friend' of my parents). She called the cops.

The Freeport police came to my house questioned me and my parents, joined in a little while by some county detectives. They were very polite. We took them down to the basement where I showed them all the stuff. The uniformed police left and the detectives continued to look at all the stuff and ask questions. They called somebody to ask some advice. It turns out they called the county labs. The guy got off the phone and asked 'you're not making any drugs down here are you?" I said no!! He smiled - he winked at my parents. Then he said the most unexpected thing: he said the gang at the labs offered to give me a tour of the labs anytime I wanted.

Then they left asking me to be careful. For me, it was actually a positive experience.

Today, I'm sure I'd face a visit from the Hazmat teams and the DHS. And, because of the triple beam balance, my house (or my parents') would be confiscated under the forfeiture rules.

At Maker Faire earlier this year, Robert Bruce Thompson gave a talk (video unfortunately truncated at both ends) that highlighted how attitudes towards chemistry have changed since he was a kid, starting with a tour of the powerful chemistry sets available in 1964 (courtesy of the Sears Catalog), and tracing the dumbing down and rising fear of liability that doomed them, until, as Kevin Kelly noted in a recent review of Robert's book, we reached "the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain 'No Chemicals!'" (Review sent out in Cool Tools email, up on the Cool Tools site soon.)

Why are we failing at math and science? Because it isn't fun any more. When you put safety on the highest altar, what do you give up? When fear of lawsuits -- not to mention fear of technology -- drives product design, marketing, and public policy, you eliminate science at its roots, in the natural experimentation of kids who want to know how the world works.

Radar Theme: Art and Technology

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

Art is emotion hacking, intended to provoke or illuminate rather than profit. Artists play on the boundaries of new materials, new modes of interaction, new technologies. Often what they build can inspire or inform useful and commercial hacking.

Watchlist: Natalie Jeremijenko, NYU ITP, We Make Money Not Art.

Radar Theme: Materials Science

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

New materials follow a curve: initially expensive and so used by R&D only, but many eventually become mass-produced and cheap and so enable mainstream applications. By tracking new materials with interesting possibilities, we can be ahead of the mass-manufacturing curve. The trick is to identify the alpha-hardware-geeks prototyping great things from the new materials.

Watchlist: Inventables.

Radar Theme: Make

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

DIY culture is back, from rocket cars to simply tweaking things you already own to make them better. People want control over their devices again, whether access to the internal computer systems of their car or the ability to make a simple flashing LED toy. Physical electronics skills are important but, thanks to the low price of microcontrollers, hardware is becoming software.

Watch List: Arduino, Tom Igoe, NYU ITP, Make Magazine, Maker Faire.