tech@vedella

• Mat Honan has a geocaching quest for you. What's in the bag? Hint: it isn't at the bottom of the sea near Pyongyang. • Want a 1.4-pound Mac? Here's OSX installed on the Vaio P! Maybe! • We got a look at the Sigma DP2 point 'n' shoot. • Ritz Camera is bankrupt. • Circuit City's liquidators are scamming customers and refusing to let investigators in. • We discovered why you shouldn't buy Dell's Mini 10 laptop. • Agile gents played Netbook Capoeira. • We gazed upon the pretty (and pretty strange) Taplamp. • Samsung put analog dials its TL320 camera. • Walt Mossberg reviewed Sony's not-a-netbook. The verdict? Screw Vista. • Casio's new high-end "vacation watch" gets a good write-up. • You can Share internet over USB: an easy hardware solution to an annoying software problem....

A snip from this month's WIRED cover story by Felix Salmon on a mathematical formula that played a critical role in the global economic collapse that's worsening still as I type this blog post. Snip: A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide. For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels. His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored. Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril. David X. Li, it's safe to say, won't be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees. Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street (WIRED). BTW, the moral of the story as I see it is that we should STOP MATH NOW! Anyway, wee also WIRED's other must-read story this month, Dan Roth on the move to bring radical transparency to the SEC. (Via @chr1sa, who I like to refer to as Original Recipe Chris Anderson) Image above: "The Market Is Not Functioning Properly" by The Joy Of The Mundane, a creative commons licensed image via flickr. Related Boing Boing blog post: How are you coping with collapse-anxiety?...

As unemployment in Britain spikes, anti-foreign labor sentiment is running high, and multinationals stand accused of violating their labor agreements by shipping in cheap workers from abroad. One employer is housing its guestworkers on a former prison ship that serves as both cheap housing and protection from angry mobs. They're floating labor camps, seabound slums, theoretically tolerable migrant housing “converted” out of old prison barges. But, one can only wonder, what “converted” actually means here, and what defines "tolerable." By the sounds of it, perhaps a few locks have been taken off the doors, a few bars removed from the cabin (cell) windows, but essentially, from what I can tell, the rest is what you might still imagine. All of which naturally conjures wretched images of slave ships from the colonial era swarming the coasts of the frontier, and begs some very basic questions here: what are the regulations around reusing or “converting” prison barges into suitable housing? What are the health standards that apply to such floating migrant camps? What constitutes appropriate compensation for their work? Are they protected by any certain safety guarantees? Is there any political agency to act on their behalf? How are these labor barges governed internationally if they operate as a sea-based entity, perhaps domiciled outside the boundaries of formal juridical sovereignty? I mean, I don't know. What is the oversight for this type of practice, if any? Subtopia: The Floating Labor Camps of the Now (via Futurismic) (Image: A Getty image of a former prison ship now used to barrack foreign workers employed at Lindsey Refinery, at Grimsby docks)...

Nina Paley's brilliant -- and troubled -- animated short "Sita Sings the Blues" will air on PBS. This is the critically acclaimed short film that blends Hindu traditional stories with jazz-era music, whose distribution has been stopped by an unforeseen copyright claim on some of the 1920s music that is integral to the film. Animated Ramayana to Air on PBS: 'Sita Sings the Blues' (Thanks, KaliMama!) Previously:Nina Paley's wonderful "Sita Sings the Blues" cartoon - Boing Boing Excellent animated interpretation of Ramayana - Boing Boing...

Becky Stern sez, "I made this cafe tablecloth using packets of Splenda, Equal, and Sweet'n Low, plus packing tape. I gathered the packets while getting coffees. I still need help coming up with a title for the piece, though." Artificial Sweetener Tablecloth (Thanks, Becky!) Previously:Embroidered MRI slice - Boing Boing HOWTO knit a skeleton cardigan - Boing Boing Vicodin earrings - Boing Boing Copper bandaid - Boing Boing Steampunk sewing machine - Boing Boing World's creepiest ski mask - Boing Boing...

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor with catholic interests. He is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Wendy.  If you're looking for a way to get back to the land and enjoy an integrated life while society collapses, The Shambhala-Shasta Anastasia Eco-Settlement Project has 466 acres of land and is looking for settlers. It sounds nice! I've long fantasized about this kind of thing. Maybe now's the time. The "Anastasia" in their name refers to the heroine of the "Ringing Cedars" series of books by Vladimir Megre, which came out in Russia during the mid-1990's and started being translated into English beginning in 2004. If numerous websites are to be believed, the series has a large following not just in Russia, but around the world. "Ringing Cedars" refers to the books' claim that when a Siberian Pine tree (sometimes translated as "Cedar") reaches 500 years of age, it becomes a sort of cosmic energy-channeling antenna. And so also rings the New Age BS detector, but please stay with me here... I read and enjoyed Anastasia, the first book in the series, and I hope to read the rest. On one level, the book is a male midlife-crisis fantasy-- a first-person account of a spiritually empty entrepreneur who finds a stunningly beautiful and brilliant native girl in the forest, and she changes his life forever. Anastasia runs naked, communicates telepathically with animals, is clairvoyant, and possesses vast wisdom that has been lost to modern civilization. She's the "noble savage," and she's also a virgin who fell in love with the author/entrepreneur during a chance previous encounter that he doesn't remember, and she wants to start a family with him ASAP. What interests me most about Anastasia (and I know I need to read more in the series to confirm/deny), is how it combines deep ecology with traditional, even conservative family values. There's no sense of hippie "alternative lifestyle" in its back-to-the-land message. It honors Christianity and connects with its audience through their experience gardening in dachas (modest country houses) on weekends. It's a container for hard-core downshifting that I sense would appeal to solid, traditional, family-oriented folks. Meanwhile, the book also has some wacky, unexpected ideas that I liked-- for example, the Anastasia character suggests that pollution from roadways could be mitigated by requiring active air purifiers on every vehicle's front bumper. Websites that sell the Ringing Cedars books also sell products derived from the Siberian Pine-- nuts, oil, and polished slices of the tree to be worn as pendants. And perhaps the initial bolt of inspiration that Megre had, as an inland shipping entrepreneur exploring the Siberian forest, was how to concoct a new religion that would maximize the commercial value of this common regional tree. A 5 gram pendant (slice of branch on a string) costs $4 plus shipping. Furthermore, according to the cult-watching Center For Apologetics Research, Megre was forced to admit in 1998 that he made the Anastasia stories up, whereupon psychic healer Olga Anatolevnya Guz began to claim that she is the real Anastasia. But people can change, eyes can open, and how one comes to create a belief system doesn't reflect on the value it contains. Buddha abandoned his wife and baby son in order to pursue his own spiritual journey, but he turned the deadbeat-dad guilt that he must have felt (although his family was rich, so less damage done) into a philosophy and practice of non-attachment that countless people, including myself, have found valuable. There are numerous paths to insight. (But I've also talked to single women in San Francisco who are sick of all the passive, "hey, babe-- no attachments" Buddhist guys.) So, Siberian Pine products aside-- not that I've tried any-- the Anastasians seem to be onto something constructive, and although I don't think I'll be joining them, I am "rooting" for them....

Carrie Fisher has always had a great sense of humor, including the Princess Leia-as-alcoholic t-shirts she sold at performances of her one-woman show, and now available online. The book jacket of Fisher's new memoir, Wishful Drinking, keeps the spirit alive. They say not to judge a book by its cover, but this one looks really fun. Wishful Drinking (Amazon)...

"House Industries presents the oeuvre of Alexander Girard with a suite of fonts and objects. Sunny faces beam from a set of childrens’ blocks; hand-made dolls speak volumes about relationships among designers; wise men preach tolerance in a nativity set; snakes, fish and foxes form a puzzling menagerie; an illustrative legacy challenges the intellect with a 72-piece memory game."...

Amateur (silent) film from the Prelinger Archives: New Orleans Carnival Week, February 22, 1941. Mardi Gras this year is tomorrow, Tuesday February 24, 2009....

Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon has the lowdown on some cool vidgame t-shirts, including the Experimental Jetset-esque games tees (above left) and also the fantastic "Simple Plan" t-shirt (above right.)...

Boing Boing reader Theodore Gray (he of the gorgeous Periodic Table posters and puzzles I've blogged before) writes in to say, Much as I hate the term steampunk, I love the style, and I notice a lot of it on boingboing, so I though you might appreciate this company, Teachspin. I saw their booth at a trade show recently and their instruments are absolutely beautiful, exactly what you'd expect of 19th century fine machining and woodworking, except they are sophisticated modern devices like NMR machines, rubidium time oscillators, and torsion balances, and you can actually buy them. I particularly like the two earth field NMR machines, "Earth's Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" and "Earth's Field NMR Gradient/Field Coil System." Here's the optical pump, and the torsion oscillator (which looks much better in person that in that photo.) Above, the Optical Pumping of Rubidium Gas device....

A reminder of an event I mentioned here on the blog last week -- LIVE from the NYPL and WIRED Magazine are hosting a roundtable discussion with Lessig, Shepard Fairey, and Steven Berlin Johnson this Thursday Feb. 26 in NYC. The event is titled "Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy" which is also the title of Lessig's book. I'm told the discussion will be about the big picture ideas and issues in Lessig's book, and was actually organized long before the AP/Obama poster/who-took-that-photo "shitstorm" -- so they won't be covering Shepard's legal issues, per se, but rather the meta cloud from which that conflict, and related conflicts and opportunities, have emerged. Tickets here, $25 general admission and $15 library donors/seniors/students. Completely inappropriate side-note: all the fellas in the promo image above add up to an awfully handsome lot, no? (thanks, Brad Grossman and Melanie Cornwell) Related: Boing Boing Video -- Our 4-part Glen E. Friedman/Shepard Fairey miniseries Update: Glen E. Friedman, who appeared in the aforementioned Boing Boing Video miniseries we shot with Shepard Fairey, points us to an interview the embattled remix artist did today on CBS News. Glen says, "Once again proves he's got it together more than most." Agreed. Completely inappropriate side-note: Dude with the bowtie crackin' me up....

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor with catholic interests. He is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco.  I'm thrilled to be guestblogging here and looking forward to learning a lot. I have many half-baked notions that I want to share, mostly in areas I'm fairly ignorant about, and so I am thankful for the opportunity to drink from the firehose of boingboing's collective knowledge. There are many books I haven't read in areas that I'm interested in, even ones that everyone else has read. The Wisdom of Crowds comes to mind here. I can't think of an online community that I'd rather tap into for diverse knowledge and pointers, and by the end of my two weeks I'll have an amazing new reading and check-out list. Another thing I want to do is process ideas for a new belief system, something like a new religion or philosophy, that will be beneficial to all and resistant to being corrupted. I think people are ready for the next level of consciousness, taking more responsibility for human behavior-- not through some passive mystical transformation, but through actively assembling an empowering and resonant outlook that grows out of the major existing belief systems, fulfilling their prophecies wherever possible, but taking them into a new direction. Let's try! That's a tall order, I know, but I believe it is possible-- many of the pieces are already here, and the timing's good. As above, I can't think of a better group to noodle on this with. I hope to gather whatever time and ideas you can spare. It's a good cause. But I've been enjoying it at boingboing for so long, thanks to everyone's participation, and I don't want this to be just take, take, take, all about my needs. I do have fun links and other stuff that I'm looking forward to sharing. But honestly, the regulars here are hard to scoop. So many of the wonderful things I know about originally reached me through them! How do I know the Boingboing gang? In the mid-90's, I submitted the short piece "Do Not Mate With Gentle Vegetarians" to Wired magazine for their "Idées Fortes" section. It wasn't a good fit, but it somehow got to Mark, who emailed me later to ask if he could use it for bOING bOING DIGITAL. Yay! A couple of years later I began working with Bob Parks at Wired, which introduced me to David and Cory, and Mark pinged me when he was looking for writers for the experimental first issue of MAKE. Later, when it turned out they needed more staff to produce the magazine quarterly, I told Mark that I was looking for a job-- lucky timing! I love it-- the Makermedia folks are a uniformly fantastic and nice group, and I really believe in what we're doing, and that it's making a positive difference. I feel very fortunate....

Artist Howard Lerner works with found materials and draws on a variety of spiritual traditions to give new life to ancient icons. I particularly like the "magic box" constructions he does, along the lines of the "wunderkammer" concept my colleague David Pescovitz muses on from time to time. Repetti in NYC will open a show of Lerner's work on March 6. Here's a blurb about the show: His stated goal is to recreate the Biblical stories of God and man from both image and word. Using the discarded remnants of our civilization for sculptural material, he weaves Holy Scripture into the individual works. This act of re-creation connects the artist (and perhaps the viewer) with the Divinity, and allows the ancient stories to come alive in the present day. The work isn't bound to a specific religious context, but instead seeks to depict stories that mingle between traditions. A large standing figure, 'Kunda-Shekina-Aherah' brings into one form several traditional representations of the Divine Feminine Principle. Known in Judaism as the Shekinah, in Yoga as the Kundalini Shakti and in the Ancient Near and Middle Eastern religions as the Asherah, the goddess here rises from the artist's vision of The Ark of the Covenant. The goddess, twisting and turning like a serpent, also invokes the Tree of Life, which alludes to what Wikipedia calls, 'the interconnectedness of all life on our planet.' Breathing a more whimsical air into these mystical wonderings is a series of small, playful constructions inspired by folk art and antique toys. Planes and fish figure prominently, providing a more light-hearted glimpse into the artist's visual exploration of mysterious worlds....

Here's a recap of the most recent editions of our daily Boing Boing Video episodes, in case you missed any of 'em. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. * ROBOEXOTICA: Booze, babes, and 'bots. download the MP4 here. A festival in Vienna that celebrates the art of designing robots that serve delicious cocktails. * WATCHMEN preview. Xeni interviews the film's director, Zack Snyder, and VFX head "DJ" Des Jardin about the CGI tech wizardry that created the characters in this motion picture adaptation of the hallowed comic. download the MP4 here. * SOVIET UNTERZOEGENSDORF, pt. 3 of 6 / Cheetos Boredom Busters (This is an ad). Agents attempt to isolate the secret ingredient inside that morphs cheese, corn, and boredom-killing antimatter. You can download the MP4 here. * THE PEOPLE TREE: David Byrne feat. Chali 2Na, Z-Trip, Gift of Gab, from "N.A.S.A." You can download the MP4 here. The world-premiere of a new video with David Byrne from the forthcoming music documentary N.A.S.A. (Myspace Link), with art by Marcel Dzama, direction and animation by Syd Garon and Johannes Gamble. Buy the "NASA: Spirit of Apollo" album here. (Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)...

The YouTube description: "Driving through a dust storm between Wilcania and Broken Hill, in NSW Australia on 21 Dec 2007." (via bangocibumbumpuluj)...

The LA Times' Marla Dickerson reports on a cheap way to turn water and salt into a degreaser and sanitizer. Used as a sanitizer for decades in Russia and Japan, it's slowly winning acceptance in the United States. A New York poultry processor uses it to kill salmonella on chicken carcasses. Minnesota grocery clerks spray sticky conveyors in the checkout lanes. Michigan jailers mop with electrolyzed water to keep potentially lethal cleaners out of the hands of inmates. In Santa Monica, the once-skeptical Sheraton housekeeping staff has ditched skin-chapping bleach and pungent ammonia for spray bottles filled with electrolyzed water to clean toilets and sinks. ... It turns out that zapping salt water with low-voltage electricity creates a couple of powerful yet nontoxic cleaning agents. Sodium ions are converted into sodium hydroxide, an alkaline liquid that cleans and degreases like detergent, but without the scrubbing bubbles. Chloride ions become hypochlorous acid, a potent disinfectant known as acid water. "It's 10 times more effective than bleach in killing bacteria," said Yen-Con Hung, a professor of food science at the University of Georgia-Griffin, who has been researching electrolyzed water for more than a decade. "And it's safe."...

On Make: television Mister Jalopy leads us through a tour of the Compact Childhood Museum, which he bought at a garage sale. Previously:Mister Jalopy on NPR - Boing Boing Guestblogger: Mister Jalopy! - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy Scores a Stingray Bike at a Garage Sale, and Comes ... Mister Jalopy's store: Coco's Variety - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy in Japanse tool collector magazine - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy on hot rodding - Boing Boing NY Times: The Los Angeles of Ry Cooder and Mister Jalopy - Boing Boing Dinosaurs and Robots Dispatch: New Digital Mag from Mister Jalopy ... Boing Boing tv: Mister Jalopy/Homemade 3D video cams - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy on his pocket guide to modest automobiles - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy on Maker Faire - Boing Boing Boing Boing tv: Mister Jalopy's Garage - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy's drive-in theater-on-a-trike - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy builds world's largest iPod - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy finds a discarded pinball machine - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy on the Von Dutch auction - Boing Boing Mister Jalopy's homage to custom vans - Boing Boing BBtv: Mark and Jalopy discuss Care Bears. - Boing Boing Mr Jalopy's love/hate relationship with the Complete New Yorker ... 9-year-old's drawings of the PSP he craves - Boing Boing...

Compare the ad photo of the heart-shaped pizza with the photo of the real thing. It looks like a toothless horse gummed a piece off the pizza. Previously:Comparing food products with their package photos - Boing Boing Photos of fast food in ads and in real life - Boing Boing...

The LA Times' Tiffany Hsu reports on people who host Tupperware-style parties where cash strapped people bring their gold jewelry to a house and sell it to an assayer who rakes in a 35% vigorish. The party Geivet attended at the Aliso Viejo home of Mary-Margaret Fincher is a twist on the old suburban Tupperware party. Here, however, it's the guests who do the selling. Erin Stevenson, who organized the party through her group My Gold Party CA, appraised the jewelry with assistant Richard Bartoletti as guests debated whether to wear heels or flats during pregnancy. To test the gold, Stevenson shaved off small flecks with a whirring Dremel tool, blanketing the dark wood of the dining table with a luminous sheen. Later, while Bartoletti peered through a magnifier attached to his eyeglasses, looking for karat stamps on the jewelry, Stevenson weeded out gold impostors with magnets and a special acidic gel. Fincher, 34, said the parties were popular in her hometown of Atlanta. As the host she gets 10% of what is paid out -- which this night was $4,000. One woman walked away with a $1,836.88 check. Stevenson pays about 65% of the market value, which works out to $5.56 for a gram of 8-karat gold, rising to $15.47 a gram for 22k. She then sells the gold to a refiner for a price just under the market trading price. Gold fever sweeps suburbia Previously:Rob Cockerham writes article critical of Cash4Gold, gets offered ... California's new gold rush - Boing Boing...