Politicians absolutely love to come out with laws saying that they're "protecting the children" as it plays well during election time. The problem, though, is that many of these laws do exactly the opposite. What they end up doing is actually preventing children from actually being able to learn necessary skills and how to deal with situations they will almost certainly face later in life. Yes, children can be much more vulnerable, but the answer isn't to hide them away from everything, but to teach them how to better deal with situations they may face. However, that tends not to be politically popular -- which is why it's that much more surprising to hear of a new report, requested by the UK Prime Minister pointing out just how problematic the rush to "protect the children" can be. As Slashdot points out, the key line from the exec summary is worth repeating:

"Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe -- this isn't just about a top-down approach. Children will be children -- pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim."

This reminds me, too, of a line used last year by famed judge (and IP expert, to boot) Richard Posner in striking down an anti-video game law:

"Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low ... It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it."

If only more people would recognize such things.

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Jordan Crane's beautiful "Little Pink Pearl" is a 26" x 40" hand-pulled silkscreen print, limited to 53 prints. Link

Ryan O'Hara writes in about BoxMaker, a postcardware app for making boxes. From the site:

BoxMaker is a little Java application that can generate the outlines for a box to be out of some material with a cutting device (ideally using wood/acrylic on a lasercutter!). You tell it the dimensions of the box (width, height, depth, material width), and it generates a PostScript file with the outlines for the 6 sides of the box. The dimensions are the outside lengths of the box.

Postcardware means the app is free, but you send them a postcard from where you live. How's that for site metrics!

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“If people use your site enough, they'll want an even faster way to reach the content they want. They're not browsing anymore. They are power users. They know what they want. Give them a nicely hackable URL to do this.”

#

Smivs writes "The BBC are getting set to fund a dig at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. The two-week dig will try to establish, once and for all, some precise dating for the creation of the monument. An article from the BBC news website explains how the dig will investigate the significance of the smaller bluestones that stand inside the giant sarsen pillars. 'Researchers believe these rocks, brought all the way from Wales, hold the secret to the real purpose of Stonehenge as a place of healing. The researchers leading the project are two of the UK's leading Stonehenge experts — Professor Tim Darvill, of the University of Bournemouth, and Professor Geoff Wainwright, of the Society of Antiquaries. They are convinced that the dominating feature on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire was akin to a "Neolithic Lourdes" — a place where people went on a pilgrimage to get cured. Modern techniques have established that many of these people had clearly traveled huge distances to get to south-west England, suggesting they were seeking supernatural help for their ills.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of tech firms are asking the FCC to allow them to make use of valuable spectrum that is unused, but controlled by television broadcasters (who don't want to give it up). The FCC has been open to such an idea for many years. Broadcasters own a ridiculously large portion of spectrum, with large parts of it totally unused. The "white space" was designed to prevent interference by not letting anything work on spectrum anywhere near broadcast spectrum. However, many are pointing out that with today's technology, that spectrum could be put to use without any interference. Microsoft and Google have both been big proponents of opening up that white space for use. In order to help show that the interference bogeyman wasn't a real issue, they've sent prototype devices to the FCC to test. Unfortunately, they seem to have trouble keeping those devices in operation. Back in August the FCC noted that the device didn't work, and now a new device from Microsoft has also stopped working.

Now, to be totally clear, the problems with these devices have nothing to do with causing interference. The devices haven't been shown to cause interference -- just to have trouble working. But, of course, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) quickly used these failures to slam the idea of freeing up the whitespace, even though there's still no evidence of interference. With the way the NAB has acted around this issue and the recent XM-Sirius merger debate, you have to conclude that the NAB thinks everyone out there is just completely stupid, and will believe any false or misleading statement it makes. Otherwise it makes no sense for the NAB to make the types of claims it makes on a regular basis. These devices are prototypes, and production devices will be totally different. Either way, the point is not whether the prototypes can keep working, but whether there's interference. That said, it would probably make sense for Microsoft to test these devices a bit more before tossing them over the wall to the FCC.

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Raelx made this absolutely sick draft tower for his keggerator with carbon fiber. DIY alert, however, the guy works for Cannondale, so he's got primo access to supplies and tools. He includes some nice construction photos, too.

Related:

• Carbon fiber Macbook Air

• Making a Carbon Fiber Bike frame

  
  

From the pages of MAKE:

Working with Carbon Fiber - Form, lay up, and cure your own high-performance composites

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Yesterday my wife and I stood in our unfinished condo deliberating paint colors. Closing day looms, and the developers require our color choices before they’ll finish their work. Our fondness for furniture aside, neither of us are interior designers or color mavens. So as we stood there in a white living room full of sawdust, we were stressing out big-time.

Fortunately one of our friends is an interior designer. We gave her a call and went back to the condo this evening. Within an hour, she took us from an intractable debate to a lovely solution. Given my line of work, I was as interested in her process as I was in the end result. How did she guide us to a beautiful color scheme when I, a supposed “designer,” couldn’t pick one color? What did she do differently?

The first thing she did is shed our preconceptions. “We can’t use a dark color in a small space” — not true. “We should have a different color in every room” — why’s that? “We don’t like [insert color]” — oh just give it a chance.

We had really boxed ourselves in with assumptions and myths, and I didn’t even realize it. She helped us forget these ideas and widen the space of possibilities. Next, instead of following abstract principles or assumptions, our designer looked closely at the colors that were already there. We looked at the colors of the cabinets, the dark wood floors, the surprising red touches in the light granite counters, and the green backsplash tiles. These were productive constraints, the kind you can juice. They reduced the possibility space in a way that was meaningful. Before long we had a palette of colors we loved, and a weight off our shoulders.

Creativity grows from constraints. But they need to be the right kind of constraints. The next time I think we “can’t” do something, I’ll try to remember my experience tonight and ask myself: Is this a meaningless preconception, or is it a productive fact I can work with? I know I’ll do better by focusing on the facts and leaving all other possibilities open.

It's not at all clear what's going on yet, but apparently the EPA has banned IBM from getting any contracts for some unnamed (serious) infraction. Apparently when one gov't agency does such a thing, others follow suit, meaning that effectively IBM may be barred from getting any new government contracts for an extended period of time (potentially up to one year). This is rather unusual, and no one seems to be saying why this ban was put in place, but needless to say, it suggests some sort of pretty serious infraction on the part of IBM.

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billybob2 writes "PolishLinux.org has an extensive screenshot review and commentary on the development version of the Free and Open Source KDE desktop. Highlights include the ability to run any desktop applet prepared for Mac OS X inside Plasma, on-the-fly annotation and rating of files from within the Dolphin file manager. It also has an improved GUI for the Amarok music player, flexible 3D eye candy configuration in KWin, and improved support for both accessing digital cameras via the Solid hardware layer and the DigiKam photo manager."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Shapiro says: "Item #3 on this page consists of an attractive woman smearing superglue on her eyelid, then repeatedly poking herself. The goal is to create a western-style eyelid "crease", and the video is just creepy." Link

I took this photo of a happy front yard in Ojai, CA, a couple of weeks ago. Click photo to enlarge.

Working my way through Season 3, in prep for Season 4, which starts this week.

Clay Roe says:

The podcast we produce, "Ask Mr. Biggs!", is a fictitious, small town radio call-in talk show.

A simple concept, to be sure. But there's a fun little twist.

Caller audio comes from real calls lifted from real talk radio shows. We remove the original host from the conversation, re-arrange the parts a bit, and insert Mr. Biggs as the new "host." The results are very seamless and comical, but not in ways you might think. We try not to go for easy laughs, but rather for a more subtle, nuanced, character-driven humor.

The podcast is produced by a couple of audio nuts, so the sound quality of the show is as good as you'll hear anywhere. Very clean and realistic. The calls are integrated with great care and precision. In fact, listeners to the podcast often never realize that the calls have been taken from other un-related sources.

It's this reason why we recently decided to lift our skirt, and expose the fact that these callers are from REAL talk radio broadcasts. You can't write this stuff. You can, however, edit and switch around what they're saying to make them even more unusual.

Link

The Glowies use a small microcontroller, but they are really quite simple in both parts and function. The core of the unit is a silicon diode used as a temperature sensor (actually, two of them). These Glowies sense when temperature drops, and it turns blue. If the temperature rises, it turns red. Plus, it's completely solar powered, so you never have to change the battery. And I used very inexpensive parts, so you can't get much cheaper!

Color-Changing Hot & Cold LED Glowies

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Dav says: "The Feds have just banned IBM as a vendor, across the board: '"IBM and its subsidiaries are barred from receiving any new government contracts, new orders under existing contracts or purchase card transactions, according to a March 28 e-mail the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Procurement Operations circulated to procurement officials.'"

The ban seems to stem from "improperly obtained information about a contract [IBM] was bidding on from EPA employees." Link

IBM is down just 1% in after hours trading.

Pink Tentacle has a nice gallery of old Japanese drawings of heads that look like faces right-side-up or up-side-down.

Joge-e, or “two-way pictures,” are a type of woodblock print that can be viewed either rightside-up or upside-down. Large numbers of these playful prints were produced for mass consumption in the 19th century, and they commonly featured bizarre faces of deities, monsters or historical figures (including some from China). Only a few examples of original joge-e survive today.

Link

A woman in Florida is claiming that it's a violation of her First Amendment rights that a library is restricting the amount of time patrons can spend on a computer. She's also upset that they're asking for ID before you can log on. The library says they're doing this to keep the wait down for a computer, but the woman says it's to keep homeless people and other low income people from using computers. It may be difficult case to prove, as it hardly seems like the library is preventing people from using the computers altogether -- just limiting how long they can use them in a single sitting. Even then, the limit of two and a half hours, does seem pretty long. The requirement for an ID might be an issue, if there are people with no IDs, but it's still difficult to see this as a First Amendment issue.

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