Geek News and Musings

From Motherboard TV:

John Coster-Mullen is “a truck-driver with minimal college education, Coster-Mullen taught himself how to build the most detailed replica of an A-bomb ever made. “The secret of the atomic bomb is how easy they are to make.”

Last year, Motherboard visited Coster-Mullen to talk with him about his life project: reverse engineering the atomic bombs America dropped on Japan. His findings are available in a book he continuously updates and publishes himself called Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man, which has received rave reviews from the National Resource Defense Council: “nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close to his exacting breakdown of the bomb’s parts.”

The Atomic Trucker: How a Truck Driver “Rebuilt” the Atomic Bomb

John Ptak, proprietor of the JF Ptak Science Bookstore, reviewed a research project report filled with “putrified moral-punk thinking on envisioning American society post nuke holocaust.” He says it’s one of many “very badly written, deeply obfuscated, sinful research projects” that he’s come across, but says this one stands out because “it is the first I can recall that restarts taxes right off the burned-up bat. Quite something, really. ”

[T]he authors clearly assume that there will be something approximately preattack life in the post-attack world. Amidst the horror and chaos, we read that

“Businessmen, in particular, but others as well, would experience disturbing and subtle changes in familiar institutions and in such bases of mutual trust as methods of establishing or verifying credit…or estimating delivery dates”–pg 11.

“Disturbing and subtle” changes to delivery, indeed.

We further read of “widespread readjustments of status, status symbols, and values” (page 11) which no doubt would come if all of your possessions were burned up, or lost or destroyed in some way, along with the owner. It is definitely difficult to maintain status relationships in the evidence of no status and no relationships. Of course this whole deal is complicated by the issue that status symbols are also relationships and associations, much of which could also be gone in the same fire cloud.

Monumentally bad writing: recovery from thermonuclear war, loan forgiveness, and taxes (1966)

With 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, the Google-owned video behemoth would be the second biggest search engine were it standalone site. I’d say these are fa web video has become a powerful medium. But, I think it’s also fair to say that this powerful medium is in serious need of curation. What if you’re just looking for a quick laugh, a short video, and don’t want to wade through billions of videos — what if you want to create your own, personally curated streaming video channel? Hmmm? Thankfully, content curation has come to video: ShortForm shows it’s here to stay.

The San Francisco-based startup allows users to create personalized channels of web video content, easily pulling clips from YouTube and other video sites. You can play videos back-to-back to create a stream of video, not unlike the TV viewing experience. Creating custom channels is simple, and I would say the UI is more user-friendly (or at least more attractive) than that of YouTube.

ShortForm curates its own videos, but the real focus is in encouraging its users to become VJs (video jockeys), curating their own channels. And with the recent addition of an embed-able widget, publishers can embed their own video player and curated channel lineups on their site. This means that the channels you create on ShortForm are available anywhere. It’s these kind of additions that pushed the startup past the one million users mark.

So ShortForm has all these visitors, but how is it going to make money? The startup is planning to place interstitial ads between videos. The Interstitial ads will be in the camp of video promotions that feel more like content and are fun to watch, ShortForm CEO Nader Ghaffari said, and they’ll be targeted based on channel context, so sports channels will get sports related video promotions. The cool part, though, is that even though the interstitial ad model will be rearing its annoying head, the startup plans to share its ad revenue with its VJs. After all, it’s the VJs who create the channels.

“When it comes to mixing the world’s videos into channels, we want our VJs to have all the tools at their disposal to make VJ-ing channels fun and easy”, Ghaffari told me. “We are integrating with Vimeo in the coming weeks, for example, so our VJs can mix YouTube and Vimeo videos, and soon we’ll be adding new features for VJs to further personalize their channels”.

ShortForm also has a leaderboard that lets VJs see how their channels are doing relative to other VJs, and viewers can scan it to find channels of interest to subscribe to. ShortForm also plans to provide VJs with more social feedback on their channels, like who has watched, shared, liked, and subscribed, for example, and VJs will be able to add commentary into their channels.

But, as you are probably readying your comment for the comment section, I should say that ShortForm isn’t the only video curation startup in the game. VodPod lets users share collect and share videos with their friends and Magnify.net allows website publishers to make video channels for their sites. ShortForm differs from its competitors in that it, unlike VodPod, it enables back-to-back streaming, and, unlike Magnify, is focused on the consumer rather than enterprise.

The startup is also teaming up with CollegeHumor (one of my favorites) this week to launch a best video contest on Facebook, which will allow users to watch and vote for their favorite videos on CollegeHumor. Once a vote has been registered, a leaderboard can be accessed that shows the leading vote-getters. Check it out.

Michael Scott points us to a paper by law professor Stephen McJohn, in which he compares what cognitive scientists have learned about the role of mirror neurons to copyright, and concluded that we may want to rethink copyright law altogether. While the paper does make some interesting points, I will admit that it’s a bit thin at certain points — especially connecting the two concepts. I’d be much more interested in a more fully fleshed out discussion. However, the paper does point out that we appear to learn and communicate by copying what we see and hear. In some regards humans are copying machines. And this presents problems for a copyright world in which copying is seen as a bad thing.

The existing policy is that ideas should be spread freely, but there is little harm in prohibiting copying of one particular expression of an idea. Other parties are free to copy the idea from the work, simply by expressing it in a different way — and any idea may be expressed in many ways. But this may rely on a false premise. If people learn and communicate in the bottom-up fashion suggested by mirror neurons, it may not be so easy to separate an idea from the expression of the idea. In a similar vein, taking a specific issue, the question whether sampling is fair use could look different if more weight were given to literal copying. Courts have held that sampling — using short, literal copies of song snippets in new recordings — is not fair use. Use of such “verbatim copying” weighs heavily against fair use, as opposed to copying that transforms the first work by adding creative elements. But such verbatim copying may be much more worthwhile, if mere copying has the importance that Ramachandran suggests [in the research about mirror neurons]. So, for example, there would be another argument for legal protection for personal, noncommercial uses, as important as they may be for learning, cultural transmission, and self-expression

As I said, some of the connections between the two fields comes across as a bit weak in the short paper, and it would be a lot more interesting to see these ideas further fleshed out to see if there really is a connection to be made here. However, it does suggest some interesting areas of research.

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[Video Link] Ted Balakar of Reason says: “This time top dishonors go to the Drug Warrior-in-Chief Barack Obama (with DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart grabbing a dishonorable mention), whose DEA banned fake pot, thwarted a scientist’s decade-long campaign to study marijuana, and raided dispensaries in Montana and California–all in one month!

“Seems like only yesterday when Obama promised he wouldn’t waste Justice Department resources raiding medical marijuana dispensaries.”

Three dolphins died earlier this month during a Navy training exercise using underwater explosives off the coast of San Diego, California. Marine mammal fatalities from military tests in that area are rare. They were so-called “common dolphins,” an unglamorous name for one of the most beautiful creatures I have ever had the great fortune to be close to, out in the water on an observation boat.

A girl from a displaced family holds her stuffed animals at an evacuation center in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan, March 31, 2011. This shelter is located about 70 km (44 miles) from the earthquake and tsunami-crippled nuclear reactor. (REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

The 360Cities people shot a 40 gigapixel panorama of the interior of the gorgeous Strahov library, an 18th century biblioparadise in the Czech Republic. You can spend a lot of time getting lost in this image, which 360Cities claims is the largest indoor image ever shot.

Strahov Library 40 Gigapixels

Windows/Mac: If you listen to a lot of music during the day, you probably pause it every once in a while when you need to focus—and then forget to un-pause it. Here's how to pause it for just five minutes. More »

“Iron” from WOODKID, via Clayton Cubitt.

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