tech@vedella

In Mexico, online local news site Nuevo Laredo Live is tweeting today that the man murdered yesterday in gruesome cartel-style killing was not, as widely reported, a blogger, forum moderator, or an affiliate of any kind with their site. Translating loosely: "Negative, he was not our partner, he is confirmed to have been a scapegoat [...]

Human Rights Watch reports that instead of reducing violence, the ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings, torture, and "disapparances." Read the report. [Video Link]

Tim Heidecker, whom you may know best as "Tim of Tim and Eric," or one of the "Check it Out with Dr. Steve Brule" creators (a second Brule season is coming up!), has come forward with new allegations of song against presidential candidate and alleged serial sexual harasser Herman Cain. Behold! Cainthology (Songs In The [...]

Warner Brothers has filed a brief in its lawsuit against file-locker service Hotfile in which it admits that it sent copyright takedown notices asserting it had good faith to believe that the files named infringed its copyrights, despite the fact that it had never downloaded the files to check, and that it sometimes named files [...]

EDF, the French energy company, has been fined €1.5 million and its head and deputy-head of nuclear operations have been jailed over its use of Kargus (a private security firm run by a French ex-secret service operative) to use illegal surveillance techniques against Greenpeace. I recently switched away from EDF at home and at the [...]

Sound It Out #6 The Cave Singers’ No Witch was probably my favorite record of 2011. It really epitomized the sludge of wintertime when it came out in January and it has managed to reflect moods and seasons throughout the year. It’s rare to hear a collection of songs that deepen over time like this [...]

Above, video footage of police beating protesters at Wednesday's "Occupy Cal" demonstrations on the UC Berkeley campus. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Miles Mathews. More on the peaceful protest, and the violent police response, here. In videos surfacing today of this and other police beat-downs at Berkeley, observers note that cops are routinely [...]

UPDATE: Nuevo Laredo Live reports that the man killed is "not one of our collaborators," but "a scapegoat" whose murder serves to send a message of fear. Animalpolitico reports about questions in the case of a man murdered yesterday in a cartel-style torture and beheading, who was identified in the press as a moderator of [...]

In this fascinating hour-long Seton Hall lecture, Art Spiegelman expounds on Maus, his Pulitzer-winning graphic novel history of the Holocaust, providing excellent companion material to Metamaus, the new book that recounts Maus's history, which came out last month. Art Spiegelman lecture

EcoFlight is a group that photographs ecological threats in western states from the vantage point of small airplanes. The idea is to give people a clear picture of the contrast between wilderness and the industrial sites that threaten the ecological health of that wilderness. It's an interesting idea, and certainly results in some amazing photos, [...]

Today's best telescopes could see the amount of light produced by Tokyo from as far away as the Kuiper Belt. Future telescopes may be able to hunt for alien civilizations by looking for artificial lighting. (Via Gary King)

One a recent art crawl in St. Paul, Minnesota, I ran across the work of Michael Bahl. Dressed in a white lab coat, Bahl bills his work as "post-osteological interpretation." Basically, he's built both skeletal monsters, and an ostensibly real research history to go with them. This creature, for instance, is a Chalicotherium laurentian. She [...]

A neat widget demonstrates the truth behind an XKCD joke: Take any article on Wikipedia, click the first link in the article, and then repeat—and you will eventually end up at "Philosophy." It even works for "Justin Beiber." (And, yes, I know, this is a biased exercise because it starts with a pre-chosen endpoint. You [...]

The Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) is home to the Astronomic Photographic Data Archive (APDA), a collection of photographic plates taken by optical telescopes from the mid-19th century through the late-20th century. Some of these plates are the only existing documentation of astronomic features that are no longer there. All of them represent shots of [...]

A grief-stricken Redditor asked by a friend if there was anything he needed quoted the Simpson's episode in which Barney's Japanese girlfriend requests "A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat." The friend obliged. My grandma died, and a good friend asked: "Is there anything you need?" As a joke, I said: [...]

John Naughton's Association for Learning Technology keynote, "The elusive technological future," is a no-holds-barred, kick-ass talk about the systems, blindspots and biases that keep us from understanding where tech has been and where it's going. John's the Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, and he's the author of the excellent [...]

In March, MAKE's Phil Torrone argued that libraries should retool to become hackerspaces. The Fayetteville Free Library in Fayetteville, NY is doing just that. Here's the story from KQED's Mindshift: Earlier this year, MAKE Magazine’s Phillip Torrone wrote a provocative article asking “Is it time to rebuild and retool libraries and make ‘techshops’?” In other [...]

The moderator of an online discussion forum about local cartel-related crime is reported to have been killed in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Near the corpse, a "narco manta," or sign taking responsibility for the murder, was found and points to the ultraviolent cartel known as the Zetas. Wired News reports that the victim was a 35-year-old [...]

Opossumnomnomnomnom. [Video Link, thanks Antinous!]

Gustavo recreated the classic Sega driving game "Outrun" as a handheld mechanical amusement, controlled by an Arduino. Made in over a month using spare time, he managed to capture all the features of this classic Sega arcade game in an Arduino-driven, servo-spinning tabletop console. The objective of the game is to drive a lap in [...]