Here's a 3-fingered robot designed to play the supremely monotonous Towers of Hanoi game at breakneck speed. Build details here: Link

The U.S. Government said it's going to try to shoot down that errant spy satellite out of the sky when its orbit decays to about 120 miles above Earth. It contains 1,000 pounds of hydrazine fuel, which "could turn into a toxic gas capable of causing deaths and injuries if it crashed in a populated area." They hope that by destroying the tank, the poison gas will disperse in the atmosphere without causing harm to living things.

In cases of controlled descents, the fuel can be burned off before reentry. But in the case of the errant spy satellite, ground controllers lost all communications shortly after it was launched in 2006, and the fuel tank remains full. U.S. officials were concerned that the fuel tank could survive reentry and that a crash landing in a populated area could disperse the hydrazine, which causes deadly effects similar to ammonia or chlorine.

...

Last year, China used a missile to shoot down one of its failing weather satellites and was harshly criticized by U.S. officials and others.

Link | More at Space.com

Markus Kison's CharmingBurka is a Bluetooth-enabled Burka that sends a photo of the wearer to nearby mobile phones. From the project description:

The Charming Burka deals with Freud's idea that all clothes can be positioned between appeal and shame. The Burka was chosen, because it is often perceived in the west as a symbol of repression. A digital layer was added so that women can decide for themselves where they want to position themselves virtually. The Burka sends an image, chosen by the wearer, via Bluetooth technology. Every person next to her can receive her picture via mobile phone and see the women's self-determined identity. The virtual appeals can not be gathered by the laws of the Koran and so the CharmingBurka fulfills the desire of living a more western life, which some Muslim women have today.

Therefore the Burka is equipped with bluetooth antenna/micro-controller and uses the OBEX protocol, already working with most mobile phones.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

These fake eyeball stickers look like they'd come in handy, but The Museum of Hoaxes is having a hard time tracking down a place that actually sells them. They look easy enough to make yourself, though. Link

Over at the MAKE: Blog, Mike Dixon posted his first installment of "Made In Japan," a weekly roundup of DIY activities happening there. Seen here is a snow sculpture of the villainous Baikinman from the anime series Anpanman. Made In Japan Vol.1 also features circuit-bent Pikachus, recipes for fermented soybean-based Natto, and eccentric maker Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu, inventor of the floppy disk.
Link

This incredible antique automaton, circa 1915-1925, just sold on eBay for $1,775. It's 32" high and 16" wide. The auction listing says it may have been "a knight from a King Arthur type of display." I think it'd look right at home in a crucifixion scene. I hope the buyer completely restores and revives the (holy) ghost in this machine. From the eBay listing:

ORIGINAL MECHANISM AND PAPER MACHE HEAD. ARMS ARE WOOD AND POSSIBLY MADE BY SCHOENHUT. GLASS EYES. ELECTRIC MOTOR CAM DRIVEN MULTIPLE ACTION MECHANISM. WORKS FINE, HEAD MOVES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. EYES MOVE LEFT TO RIGHT, AND EYELIDS OPEN AND CLOSE. BREATHING ACTION AS A CHEST PANEL RISES AND FALLS. OUT OF AN ESTATE IN STATEN ISLAND , NEW YORK. POSSIBLY FROM HAPPYLAND AMUSEMENT PARK . BELIEVED TO BE A KNIGHT FROM A KING ARHTUR TYPE OF DISPLAY. THE MAKER IS SAID TO BE WILLIAM H AND CHARLES W COOK OF COOK STUDIOS AT 550 EAST DUPONT STREET,ROXBOROUGH PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA. MAKERS OF DISPLAYS, AND ADVERTISING DISPLAYS.

Link (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson and Andrew Brandou!)

Earlier this week, we wrote about a dispute over the trademark on "Lennon" between Yoko Ono and the singer Lennon Murphy. As we said, while it did seem odd that Ono waited until the very last minute to protest the trademark, the really problematic part was Murphy applying for the trademark in the first place. Yoko Ono (or, more likely, a representative of Ono) contacted us today by email to clarify her position:

"A musician named Lennon Murphy is claiming that Yoko Ono has sued her and that Yoko is seeking to stop Lennon Murphy from performing under her name, Lennon Murphy. Both of these claims are untrue.

Several years ago, Lennon Murphy sought Yoko's permission to do her performances under her name, Lennon Murphy. Yoko, of course, did not object to her request. Subsequently, without Yoko's knowledge, Lennon Murphy filed an application in the United States trademark Office requesting the exclusive right to utilize the name "Lennon" for musical performances. Yoko's attorneys asked Lennon Murphy's attorneys and manager to withdraw her registration of exclusivity to the name LENNON for the trademark. Yoko also offered to cover all costs Lennon Murphy had incurred in filing for the trademark. But Lennon Murphy went ahead to register.

Yoko did not sue Lennon Murphy, but sought to stop her from getting the exclusive right to the name Lennon for performance purposes. For that, Yoko's attorneys, simply notified the Trademark office that Yoko did not believe it was fair that Ms. Murphy be granted the exclusive right to the "Lennon" trademark in relation to musical and entertainment services. As you can see, this is a very important issue for Yoko and the Lennon family.

Yoko says: "I am really hurt if people thought that I told a young artist to not use her own name in her performances and had sought to sue her. I did no such thing. I hope this allegation will be cleared."

Thank you for your kind attention,
Yoko"

So there we have it. In retrospect, this actually looks like a rather lame publicity stunt by Lennon Murphy, first registering for a trademark on the name, and then complaining about Ono's request to the USPTO not to grant it.

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President Bush wants to give the phone companies immunity.

Who would you like to give immunity to?

What crimes are you willing to excuse?

Shoemaker brings us a follow-up to Comcast's recent defense of its traffic management procedures. The companies involved in the original FCC investigation are not satisfied with Comcast's response. From Ars Technica: "Comcast made an aggressive defense of its policies, claiming that it only resets P2P uploads made during peak times and when no download is also in progress. Free Press, BitTorrent, and Vuze all say that's not good enough. In a conference call, Vuze's general counsel Jay Monahan drew the starkest analogy. What Comcast is really doing, he said, wasn't at all comparable to limiting the number of cars that enter a highway. Instead, it was more like a horse race where the cable company owns one of the horses and the racetrack itself. By slowing down the horse of a competitor like Vuze, even for a few seconds, Comcast makes it harder for that horse to compete. 'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?' asked Monahan."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Web 2.0 meets Marxist economic theory in the latest video hijinks from Austrian subversive art collective monochrom. Meet an online porn monster ("iPhone? noooom nom nom nom") and learn how Google-y eyed neo-liberalism screws over the proletariat in "Kiki, Bubu, and the Shift."

Link to Boing Boing tv post with comments thread and downloadable video.

More monochrom episodes on Boing Boing tv:

* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

It now appears all but certain that the stopgap Protect America Act, which Congress passed in August, will expire this weekend, despite dark warnings from the White House that this would create a parlous "intelligence gap" and stymie intelligence community efforts to track terrorists. House Republicans, led by Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, staged a walkout to protest Democrats' refusal to schedule an immediate vote on a bill approved in the Senate earlier this week enacting more permanent changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Unlike the RESTORE Act passed in the House back in October, the Senate bill establishes only limited checks on warrantless surveillance of communications between Americans and foreigners, and includes a provision granting retroactive amnesty to telecoms charged with illegally providing customer data to the government without a court order.

Democrats are, for a change of pace, fighting back against charges that they are soft on security issues. Contra predictions of imminent doom, many are now pointing out that the practical effect of the PAA's lapsing is likely to be quite limited, as any surveillance authorized under the law can continue unabated for another six months. And for all the administration's dire forecasts, Democrats note that it was House Republicans who voted down a further temporary extension of the PAA in the shadow of a presidential veto threat, and the Republican leader in the Senate who blocked a bicameral conference on the bill, in hopes of forcing the immediate approval of the White House–endorsed Senate bill. In a letter to President Bush today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had drawn the ire of progressives for his perceived compliance with White House demands, blasted what he characterized as the administration's "reckless attempt to manufacture a crisis over the reauthorization of foreign surveillance laws."

Julian Sanchez is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Julian Sanchez and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Lucas123 writes "A District Court judge this week ruled in favor of a Washington-based watchdog group, allowing them to question White House officials about missing emails involving controversial issues. The subjects include the release of the identity of a former CIA operative, the reasons for launching the war in Iraq and actions by the US Department of Justice. The group had filed suit [PDF] last May against the White House Office of Administration, seeking access to White House email under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The discovery ruling is bringing to light issues of email retention in businesses and other private organizations. We've previously discussed the White House's difficulties with email."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Danny from the EFF says,

Mark Fiore has a great little animated sequence explaining the U.S. government's domestic spying program from the point of view of the cutest homeland security advocate in the world -- Snuggly the Security Bear!

While there was some decent news suggesting the economy might not be falling into a recession, there are still plenty of knowledgeable folks who think some sort of recession is likely. Last week, in New York, plenty of folks I spoke to seemed to believe we were already in one. Of course, to actually call a recession, the general consensus is that there would need to be two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. So how would you measure that growth? Well, apparently the White House would prefer to make it as difficult as possible. Reader Jon writes in to note the rather inconvenient timing of the Administration suddenly deciding to shut down its own website that aggregated economic indicators. The site, EconomicIndicators.gov had even won awards from Forbes as a great resource. The timing of the closure certainly raises some questions. It's not that difficult to manage a website (though, I recognize, in the government, all costs are multiplied by some insanity multiplier). If it's really so expensive to manage, why not throw it open and make it into a wiki? Hell, perhaps Jimbo Wales or somebody can build a WikinomicIndicators site instead.

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The Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about a project by University of Alabama researchers to develop a database capable of anticipating targets for future guerrilla attacks. Quoting Space War: "Adversaries the US currently faces in Iraq rely on surprise and apparent randomness to compensate for their lack of organization, technology, and firepower. 'One way to combat these attacks is to identify trends in the attackers' methods, then use those trends to predict their future actions,' said UA-Huntsville researcher Wes Colley. 'Some trends from these attacks show important day-to-day correlations. If we can draw inferences from those correlations, then we may be able to save lives by heightening awareness of possible events or changing the allocation of our security assets to provide more protection.' Researchers reviewed the behavior signatures of terrorists on 12,000 attacks between 2003 and mid-2007 to calculate relative probabilities of future attacks on various target types."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LambAndMint writes "In what can only be described as an act of utter desperation to overcome Vista's mostly negative public perception issues, Microsoft has put together an online "Fact or Fiction" quiz about Windows Vista. Every person who submits themselves to Microsoft indoctrination gets a free shirt and the chance to win a $15,000 prize. Some of the supposed 'facts' will make you feel like you're reading a document from an alternate reality. Get ready to get a job as a computer salesman for a mass-market retailer as you go through the quiz."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This video is oh-so-wrong, but I got a good chuckle out of it, especially since I'm a list freak. (If I complete a task that I forgot to add to my list, I'll add it to the list after the fact and then cross it off.)

Terrific music by Patrick & Eugene is called "The Birds and the Bees" (Via Random Good Stuff)

Our friend Irwin Chusid has released a new Jim Flora print, and it's lovely.

Jim Flora Art LLC has produced a limited-edition, archival-quality fine art print of a 1954 Jim Flora hand-tinted woodcut entitled Manhattan.

The cityscape depicts New York in its 1950s glory, including a number of gotham landmarks such as the Empire State Building, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, the Statue of Liberty, famous theaters and legendary musical bistros, Washington Square arch, subways, taxis, horse-drawn carriages and tourists.

Only twenty-five (25) prints of Manhattan were produced for this edition. We are offering five (5) prints (#21/25 through #25/25) now on eBay. After these five prints are sold at the asking price, prices will increase for the rest of the edition.

Link