tech@vedella

[Video Link] Daniel Maurer of The Local, the NY Times's East Village blog, says: "Here's some rather amazing surveillance camera footage of some kids stealing vaporizers from an East Village head shop. They casually swipe four vaporizers and then not only do they come back minutes later for more, but one of the kids appears [...]

Clay Shirky's got another barn-burner of an essay, this one on the call to establish a functional news system with stable places for reporters by creating stable newspapers (Shirky: "like saying that if we had some ham, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some bread."). Institutions reduce the choices available to their [...]

Hardware hacker extraordinare Bunnie Huang explains why the new defense bill, which makes it a crime to sell a "counterfeit" chip to the US military, is going to place an impossible burden on retailers, importers, and suppliers: To better understand the magnitude of the counterfeiting problem, it’s helpful to know how fakes are made. The [...]

Eminent neuroscientist Moran Cerf got his start as an Israeli military hacker and then as a private security/penetration tester, robbing banks at their own behest over the net. In this hilarious anaecdote, he describes what happened when he and his pals decided to rob a bank in person. Moths - Heart

[Video Link] Last Night on What's Trending our friend and Gweek guest David-Michel Davies, the Webbys' Executive Director, presented a fantastic Webby Talk entitled, "Staying in to Go Out: Your computer as a café, bar, water cooler, classroom, tasting room, and concert hall."

This project at Washington State University is incredibly nifty. Researchers use a 3-D printer to make a bone-like material that can temporarily do the job of bone, while serving as a scaffold for new bone to grow on. Over time, it dissolves safely. Read more about it on the WSU website Video Link

Boing Boing’s Rob, Maggie, and Mark, and cartoonist Ruben Bolling gabbed excitedly for over an hour about books, games, TV shows, writing implements, comic books, and more! • Maggie talks about her book, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, which comes out from Wiley & Sons on April [...]

A short eulogy for Aptera, and the end of electric cars as futurism.

A reader writes, "Author and futurist Bruce Sterling wraps-up the 2011 Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art in downtown Reno. 28 minutes of laying it down." Goddamn I love listening to Chairman Bruce lay it down and pick it up again. Bruce Sterling Closes the 2011 A+E Conference - Full version

This is a really fascinating entry in The Guardian's multi-video package about heart health and medicine. Bruce Martin, a British anesthesiologist, talks about his job, anesthetizing patients for heart surgery. If this doesn't make your job seem less stressful by comparison, then you're probably a fighter pilot or something. Via Ed Yong

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez, A year ago, you may remember that the Sunlight Foundation launched the PAC Name Generator. It was a light-hearted project to shed light on how political organizations cower behind a circus of patriotic gobbledygook. Turns out some folks took it rather seriously and have used it to create real [...]

At Comics Alliance, Chris Sims makes such a good argument that I can only gape and think, "Oh my god, why had I never noticed this before?" Because that's the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren't monsters, they're liars. I can't imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have [...]

One of the things I enjoy about writing for BoingBoing is the opportunity it's giving me to learn how to write reviews of books. That's not something I'd ever done before I started writing here. And I'm only now getting around to experimenting with not only describing books I like, but figuring out how to [...]

During its heyday, Pablo Escobar's drug cartel spent $2,500 per month on rubber bands for bricks of cash. Mental Floss has a interesting profile of the drug lord. The profits were astronomical at every step. In 1978 each kilo probably cost Escobar $2,000 but sold to Lehder and Jung for $22,000, clearing Escobar $20,000 per [...]

A pair of diamond crystals, large enough to be seen by the naked eye, have been linked together by quantum entanglement. The diamonds are entangled such that manipulating one affects the other, even though they are physically separated. In this case, the crystals were 3 millimeters wide and 15 centimeters apart. (One of the diamond [...]

Female stock photography models for Cain. UPDATE: Cain's Shutterstock groupies have abandoned him!

The Dork Tower webcomic has a modest proposal: a crowdfunding site called "Kickstopper" that raises funds to persuade Hollywood studios to halt production on tired sequels, franchises, and adaptations. Dork Tower Thursday (via The Mary Sue)

[Video Link] Ted Balaker says: The Nanny of the Month Award goes to the Wolverine State pol whose so-called "Hot for Teacher" bill could end up criminalizing sex between consenting adults of legal age. The ban on teacher-student sex (even if both are older than 18 and consenting) hasn't received much media attention thus far. [...]

Spot the difference.

[Video Link] A brave girl asks Michele Bachman why same-sex couples can't get married. During a town hall, 16-year-old Jane Schmidt, the head of her school's Gay-Straight Alliance, asked the famously anti-gay congresswoman how she would support the LGBT community. After Bachmann said that "all Americans have the same civil rights," Schmidt pressed her, even [...]