Annalee Newitz has a great post up today on i09, Gawker's sf blog, about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spaceship Captains:

# Don't be afraid to hook up with a cute spaceman. We love Leela on Futurama not just because she's the only person on her ship with any kind of sense, but because she also lets her long, purple hair down once in a while. She's always tangling with spacemen and getting mixed up with strange alien pets. And that's one good reason why her goofy crew would follow her to the ends of the galaxy -- well, if she had enough beer. Lesson learned? A good leader has to get laid once in a while, and she shouldn't be ashamed of it.

# When you're about to go genocidal, get a second opinion. Admiral William Adama from the new Battlestar Galactica is one of the best leaders we've ever seen. He's gotten a group of a few thousand humans halfway across the galaxy, despite the fact that they're being pursuit by a group of homicidal, erotically obsessed cyborgs. He's had to deal with incredible loss and sheer terror, and he always keeps his head. He is also truly humane. How does he keep it together without going all Admiral Cain on everybody's ass? By sharing his power with President Roslyn as well as his circle of trusted officers and advisers.

Link

While I'm obviously a strong believer in the idea that our patent system is fundamentally broken, I've also made it clear that the current plans for patent reform have a lot of problems. While it will fix a few things, it will also make other parts much worse, and will lead to even more abuse of the system. It's "reform" that's designed to simply patch a few things that are seen as problems, rather than recognizing the core, fundamental problems with the system -- and, thus, it will do little to help (and could hurt). The EFF, which supports this patent legislation generally, is complaining about another potential problem with the current reform package. As written, the patent reform effort would make it much more difficult for third parties to contest questionable patents in some cases. Basically, rather than allowing them to request a full patent re-exam, it will force third parties to use the newly created post-grant review system, which has some limitations. For example, it would mean that groups like the EFF would need to contest a patent within 12 months of it being issued. That's a problem, because it often doesn't become clear how problematic a patent is until much later. In fact, if this policy were in place, it would have made the EFF's patent busting project impossible. From the very start of the patent system, it was supposed to only be used in the rarest of circumstances. With that in mind, it makes sense to make the process for getting rid of bad, unnecessary and dangerous patents as easy as possible. It's unfortunate that the system has morphed into the exact opposite.

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Hugh Pickens writes "What is transparent, swims, and helps cure cancer? Caspar the friendly fish — a zebrafish bred with a see-through body to make studying disease processes easier for rapidly changing processes such as cancer, Zebrafish are genetically similar to humans in many ways and serve as good models for human biology and disease. In one experiment, researchers inserted a fluorescent melanoma tumor into the abdominal cavity of the transparent fish and by observing the fish under a microscope, they found that the cancer cells started spreading within five days and could actually see individual cells spreading. "The process by which a tumor goes from being localized to widespread and ultimately fatal is the most vexing problem that oncologists face," says Richard White, a clinical fellow in the Stem Cell Program at Children's Hospital Boston. "We don't know why cancer cells decide to move away from their primary site to other parts in the body." Researchers created the transparent fish, (photo) by mating two existing zebrafish breeds, one that lacked a reflective skin pigment and the other without black pigment. The offspring had only yellow skin pigment, essentially appearing clear."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Greenpeace activist was recently arrested for protesting in front of the US Department of the Interior while wearing an awesome polar bear fursuit. He was trying to draw attention to the Bush Administration’s delay in issuing a final Endangered Species Act listing for the polar bear due to global warming. Link to Greenpeace blog post.

But guess who made the costume? The exceedingly talented artisan Lionel, whose work was featured in two Boing Boing tv episodes about furries:

* American Furry #1: Life, Liberty, and the Fursuit of Happiness.
* American Furry #2.

... and in this Boing Boing post about how to make an Animatronic Lion Mask with stereo night vision and amplified hearing.

Lionel named this polar bear fursuit prototype "Snowshine." (thanks, Marianne Shaneen!)

A newly launched project called White House Redux invites you to design a new home for the U.S. Presidency:

What if the White House, the ultimate architectural symbol of political power, were to be designed today? On occasion of the election of the 44th President of the United States of America, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenge you to design a new residence for the world's most powerful individual. The best ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos will be selected by some of the world's most distinguished designers and critics and featured in a month-long exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in July 2008 and published in Surface magazine. All three winners will be flown to New York to collect their prizes at the opening party.

Link. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Dan Ancona says,

A few preliminary pictures of an Obama rallying sign created by artist, designer and maker James Home, based on the image created by Shepard Fairey. Amazing BlinkM lighting technology courtesy of Mike Kuniavsky and ThingM Global Marketing.

This thing looks completely amazing in action. It basically works like a political tractor beam, pulling in the formerly hopeless, cynical and apathetic and parking them in the warm shuttle bay of hope and action. Something like that.

Here's a pic of it doing its thing.

Link. (thanks, WdGIII!)

Previously on BB: Shepard Fairey's Obama Poster.

Last week, Mark blogged about reports that TSA agents in certain US airports were reportedly demanding that air travelers remove *all* electronics from their carry-on luggage (not just laptops, but phones, cables, cameras, everything) during screening. Mark referenced Scott Beale's post, and I believe Beale was the first to speak up about it. He experienced this at SFO, but many others traveling in or out of SFO around the same time (myself included), did not -- so everyone was confused.

Today, on the newfangled Official TSA Blog (RSS), there's a super awkward apology of sorts, and an even more awkward but hearty back-slap to bloggers for bringing the issue to public attention. That's their logo, above.

Why awkward? For starters, there's the title: "HOORAY BLOGGERS! A Win for the Blogesphere." (sic). Here's what they say to the, erm, "blogesphere."

Posters on this blog have had their first official impact on our operations. That’s right, less than one week since we began the blog and already you’re affecting security in a very positive way.

On Monday afternoon we began receiving questions about airports that were requiring ALL electronics to be removed from carry-on bags (everything, including blackberrys, iPods and even cords). This practice was also mentioned on several other blogs and left us scratching our heads.

So…we checked with our security operations team to figure out what was going on. After some calls to our airports, we learned that this exercise was set up by local TSA offices and was not part of any grand plan across the country. These practices were stopped on Monday afternoon and blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night. (Fat Tuesday of course).

Attention: LA peeps! Earlier this week, Mark posted about the Maker Faire tryouts taking place at Machine Project on Saturday. This will be fun, and you should attend! But there are, in fact, even more events taking place at Machine Project this very weekend -- and I'll be there for all of them with the Boing Boing tv crew for an extended dance remix of hijinks with our trusty video cameras. Mark Allen of Machine Project explains:

1. On Friday February 8th at 8pm, we’re hosting the first-ever competition for the new sport of Cabling (aka competitive cable untangling), founded by Steven Schkolne, and featuring interns in jumpsuits, a discussion of knot theory, three rounds of untangling various extension and A/V cords, and pretzels. Qualifying rounds will be two nights before on Wednesday, February 6th, from 8-11pm. If you’d like to try out for a spot in the competition, please email us at machine@machineproject.com to schedule a time to come in on the 6th. We strongly encourage aspiring competitors to come up with intimidating Cabling nicknames for themselves.

2. We have negotiated the Mithril shipments needed for the armor for Brody Condon - Performance Modification (Nauman) that happens from 8-10pm Saturday February 9th. To recap - 10 performers outfitted in medieval/space/fantasy armor re-create Bruce Nauman’s 1973 work “Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down”. Performed in slow motion and combined with movements based on computer game death animations, this piece is accompanied by a high volume binaural beats reputed to induce out of body experiences.

Link. BB readers in LA, see you there, come join us for the Boing Boing tv taping! BB readers who are not in LA: we'll share it on BBtv soon. (Image above: courtesy of Flickr user Clarkk / shot by Jonathan Arehart, via Cable Messes; below, courtesy Brody Condon.)

DaMassive writes "Computerworld Australia is running a story with a response from Microsoft to Infoworld's SAVE XP petition Web site, which has gathered over 75,000 signatures so far. Apparently Microsoft is aware of the petition, but says it is "listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us" — a somewhat strange response given that the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers! The Save XP movement has attracted the attention of the software giant, despite its claims that Vista has sold more than 100 million copies and its adoption rate is in line with the company's expectations. "We're seeing positive indicators that we're already starting to move from the early adoption phase into the mainstream and that more and more businesses are beginning their planning and deployment of Windows Vista," the company said. Nevertheless vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and more recently NEC, all offer the opportunity to downgrade to XP Pro."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As part of Time Warner's earnings conference call, the company noted that it will be splitting AOL into two parts: cutting the rapidly shrinking access subscriber business from the content/advertising business. Many folks are assuming this is in preparation to finally sell AOL off. Of course, like so much that AOL/Time Warner has done over the years, this is too little too late. Remember the happy days in the 90's when AOL would come out with a press release announcing every million new subscribers? Funny that they don't do that for every million lost subscribers... However, it's been those subscribers that have hindered AOL's ability to adjust. For years, they were afraid to do too much with free content to lose that subscription base, even as that subscription base was figuring out that they could already go elsewhere and get the same content for free (and buy access for much less). So, when the company finally adopted a free model, it was too late to simply throw the doors open. People just weren't that interested. The same is true now. Time Warner had a chance to salvage AOL years back, if they had aggressively tied it to a broadband strategy rather than competing with itself and giving lip service to a more complete strategy which never actually seemed to happen. Finally separating out the dwindling access business is hardly going to catapult the rest of the business forward, as most people have simply moved on to other sources. While the sheer size of AOL's traffic can hold it up for a while (and may make it an attractive buyout for someone looking only to buy some traffic), it's lack of innovation and growth have pretty much doomed it to also-ran status.

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narramissic writes "Remember the controversial Mac hacking contest from last year's CanSecWest conference? No? Here's a refresher: Conference organizers challenged attendees to hack into a Macintosh laptop, with the successful hacker winning the computer and a cash prize. Winner Dino Dai Zovi found a QuickTime bug that allowed him to run unauthorized software on the Mac once the computer's browser was directed to a specially crafted Web page. Well, the contest is back again this year, but with a twist, says Dragos Ruiu, the principal organizer of CanSecWest: 'We're thinking of having a contest where we have Vista and OS X and Linux ... and see which one goes first.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My cousin (and his crew) just launched a new online storage and backup service called SpiderOak.

One of the especially friendly features includes the automated invisible backup feature:

SpiderOak automatically recognizes any new and/or edited document, photo, song, or movie and backs it up in real time without you ever having to think, wonder or worry. This automated system works quietly in the background – never slowing down applications or Internet connections.

They also have versioning so you can roll back to any previous version of a backed-up file. They have desktop client software for Mac, Windows, Linux 32 bit, and Linux 64 bit.

There’s a growing number of online file storage and backup services out there, but if you’re in the market you may want to add SpiderOak to your consideration list.

RELATED: A New Online Backup Solution (O’Reilly Digital Media)

PlainBlack writes "Possibility isn't limited by technology. And it's certainly not limited by human imagination. What makes something impossible is the lack of cold, hard, cash. Wired blog takes a look at 10 science fiction technologies we could build, if they weren't so expensive. 'New York-L.A. Maglev Express - Cost: $70bn (Based on established construction costs). At $70bn, it's tantalizingly affordable by the standards of this roundup: a train that could beat airliners from one side of the country to the other. Many agree that Maglev has enormous potential. Bite-sized examples are in operation all over the world. Birmingham, England, had the first in the 1980s, though the promise of airliner-like speeds on land is still unrealized. The British system sped along at a pathetic 26MPH and was designed to get air travelers to the planes, not to outrun them.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've already discussed the inherent dangers of basing a business model on the economics of virtual worlds. While there definitely is quite a bit of trade in virtual goods (often for lots of money), it's mostly based on ideas of artificial scarcity on goods that are effectively infinite. To drive that point home, Josh sent in an interesting story about a lawsuit between two founders of one such virtual world, where part of the complaint was that one of the guys effectively handed over the company to a third guy -- who planned to make money by selling the game world's currency, noting that once he controlled the company, he could just create an "infinite" amount of money in "a few minutes" and sell it at "below market" prices. While this suggests the folks in question had little sense of how basic economics works, it also highlights a pretty serious risk in these virtual worlds. At the same time that we're seeing Ben Bernanke struggling with managing the monetary policy of the US economy, for virtual worlds where there really is no scarcity at all, the temptation to simply flood the market without recognizing the consequences is just too great.

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mitbeaver writes "I'm planning a round-the-world trip. 6+ months in developing countries, including Everest base camps 1 & 2, the deserts of Namibia and lots of places in between. I want to bring something to write (blogs or the Great American Novel) and burn DVD photo backups to mail home. I don't really need much in the way of power, but I do need it to survive the altitude, dust, moisture of tropical locations, and being hauled around non-stop for the better part of a year. I will be carrying my life in my backpack, so every pound counts. It looks like some 'semi-rugged' ultraportables exist, but the truly 'rugged' are all pretty heavy. These are pricey, and the risk of theft is non trivial. A smaller laptop is easier to keep on my person more often, which is safer (in most countries) than leaving it in the hostel/hotel. Still, the rugged guys are 2x the price — almost worth buying a cheap one and planning an on the road replacement purchase. I know we've talked about gadgets to carry around the world before, but any advice would be greatly appreciated." We also discussed laptop travel cases a little more than a year ago.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emil Sundberg asks:

When serving thousands of customers with Basecamp, Highrise etc there must be a lot of advanced features though, how do you document your projects? How easy is it for a newly hired developer to understand how your products work.

The short answer is that we don’t document our projects. At least not in the traditional sense of writing a tome that exists outside of the code base that somebody new to a project would go read. I haven’t even seen that work consistently and successfully at any software company I’ve been involved with.

Further more, I don’t really find it necessary for the kind of work that we do. Our biggest product, Basecamp, is about 10,000 lines of code. That really isn’t a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Everything we do is build is also using Ruby on Rails, which means that most Rails programmers would know their way around our applications straight away. It’s the same conventions and patterns used throughout.

We try to do a fairly good job at keeping our test suites current and exhaustive as well. Basecamp has a 1:1.2 ratio of test code (thanks to the persistence of Jamis!), Highrise has a ratio of 1:0.8 (bad me!). So you can change things in the applications and feel fairly comfortable that you at least haven’t killed the entire application if you make a mistake as the tests would catch that.

Finally, we write our application in a wonderfully expressive and succinct programming language like Ruby that leads itself very well to a programming style like the one Kent Beck preaches in Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. Keep your methods short and expressive. On average, our models have methods just four lines long. Adding documentation to a method should usually only be done when you’re doing something non-obvious that can’t be rewritten in an obvious way.

Writing documentation for your code base is a very heavy, upfront, planning kind of way to go about things. Maybe that’s what you need some times if you work in an environment that’s especially onerous or if you have very complex policies and strategies you’re implementing. But if you’re not burdened with such things, I’d recommend trying to work on the quality of the code itself and see if you can get by with sparring with new developers.

Got a question for us?
Got a question about design, business, marketing, etc? We’re happy to try to provide some insight into how we’d tackle the problem. Just email svn [at] 37signals dot com with the subject “Ask 37signals”. Thanks.

bendodge writes to mention the BBC is reporting that researchers at the University of Tucson, Arizona have created a polymer that allows holographic images to be created in minutes. Normally holographic images are created by mixing the results of multiple laser lights to lay down a static image, a lengthy and delicate process. "In a paper in Nature Mr Tay and colleagues describe their thin-film polymer that can have images 'written' to it in minutes and can be wiped as quickly to take and display another image. The material has been shown to stay stable throughout hundreds of write and erase cycles. The ability to quickly refresh images in holographs could mean that surgeons use them as a guide during operations or as a better way for pharmaceutical researchers to study molecular interactions for new drugs during simulations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.