Cool science toy: a DIY fuel cell car.

Pour in the water and watch it separate into hydrogen and oxygen, forming a gas to power your vehicle across the floor. Now that we have your attention, roll up your sleeves and find out more through experiments and demonstrations you can do on your own, in a classroom or with friends.

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Chris Nakashima-Brown is a hot up-and-coming sf writer whose prose is slick, post-Gibsonian, and funny as hell, like Neal Stephenson meets Hunter S. Thompson. His latest story, about the art dealer who supplied Saddam with his kitschy barbarian-art paintings, is up on Infinite Matrix, called "Script-Doctoring the Apocalypse."

Womack turned to look his guest in the eye. It was only then that Friedman looked closely at the Captain's Hawaiian shirt and realized the pattern was a camouflage design carefully woven from graphic designs of the heads of Seventies action heroes: Mr. T, Bruce Lee, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson.

"Beautiful shirt," said Friedman. "Postmodern Escher-wear."

"Thanks," he answered. "Got it down the street from your gallery. They've got some cool shops up there. You snuck out early that day to party with your boyfriends, so we figured we'd catch up with you this weekend. What we need is for you to help us get some new memes in front of your favorite client."

"Well, you can't just..."

"It's about time," said Womack. "You didn't think you could spend a year working as the Leader's personal shopper without attracting our attention, did you? You're closer to the man than we could ever hope to be."

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Computer animators have been using cellular automata in their crowd scenes for ages, granting the dancers in the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Orcs in LotR the liberty to autonomously determine the fine details of their movement, creating realistic mob scenes that appear to contain a cast of thousands. The problem is, as the programming for the automata gets more sophisticated, they start to express non-linear behavior.

In the climax for The Return of the King, the animated forces of evil kept running away from their enemies.

"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that..."

"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said.

"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."

Link (Thanks, Yoz!)

I discovered Jack Kirby around 1972 (with KAMANDI) and quickly devoured his comics from the previous decade, especially Fantastic Four. Here's a nice NYT article about 1960s comic books that sums up why they're so great.

Just as Mr. Infantino's Flash had captured the gung-ho futurism of the late 50's, illustrators like Kirby and Mr. Ditko brought an appropriately darker, grittier and sometimes spaced-out look to Marvel's pages in the mid-60's. The Fantastic Four spent a lot of time on the Lower East Side, where Kirby had grown up. Mr. Ditko's hallucinatory illustrations for the mystic Dr. Strange had a direct impact on the psychedelic art that bloomed a few years later. In "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," Tom Wolfe reported that the LSD guru Ken Kesey spent hours studying Dr. Strange comics with acid-inspired probity. Rock-concert posters also lifted the character's image.

Link (thanks, Scott!)

The United States Olympic Committee says it and it alone can use the word "olympics" to describe an athletic competition, which miffs the organizers of the Robolympics. I filed a story about the copyright conflict between bot-builders and the USOC for Wired News here.

"The last time I checked, the USOC wasn't hosting robot sumo events," said Calkins. "Common sense dictates that no one would confuse a 6-pound hunk of steel and plastic with Picabo Street, nor would this dilute her image or in any way disrespect her accomplishments. "We won't compete against them in the 50-yard dash, so I don't see why they won't help us to create an aptly named forum for competing in robotic line-following or robot firefighting," he said.

Phonecam snapshot of freshly plastered flyers along Vermont street in Silverlake, outside the House of Pies where I just ate breakfast. Click thumbnail for larger pic. Who's behind these? I bet it's the Y-Que posse, whose store is like a block away. Everything's always "WANTED" or "FREE SOMEONE" with those people. UPDATE: BoingBoing reader "Crimefighter" says, "Actually the 'Wanted: Santa' poster was related to the Santanarchy/SantaCon in LA. It's a Cacophony Society related event. See this site for more info."

Here's a firmware update that can region-free-ify and speed up your Mac's Superdrive DVD drive. Warning: may screw up your computer ferociously. Warning: may violate the DMCA. Warning: It's your goddamned computer, why the hell hasn't Apple given you the capability of watching all your DVDs on it, no matter what country you bought them in? Link (Thanks, Pat!)

Ben sez, "Sony's marketing for Spiderman 2 includes a huge weblogging push, including Blogger and LiveJournal templates, for the downloading." Link (Thanks, Ben!)

If you're frustrated by the ease-of-use represented by a 101-key keyboard, why not buy one of these USB "Texting" keyboards with a 12-button phone-pad, and recreate the fakenet experience of SMS on your PC? Link (via MobileWhack)

BBSpot's got the high-larious scoop on God's copyright wroth:

God said that 'spreading the Gospel' was not a valid defense for distributing copyrighted materials. "Rev. Jackson has published at least 35% of My word electronically, where anyone with an internet connection can download it. Thrice did I call on him to repent; thrice did he ignore me or refer me to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation]."

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

An independent in-game newspaper published in The Sims Online is being censored by Maxis for running ads for underage in-game sex.

So The Alphaville Herald continues to push the edge of the envelope. In this case the envelope has "Underage Child Sexual Solicitation in Virtual Worlds" written all over it. They're running a mind-boggling interview with an avatar who's been turning tricks in TSO since the early days. Since this sexual activity involves real money, an under-age protagonist, and the violation of a serious number of federal and state sexual solicitation statutes, it's your required reading for the day. Call it research.

Oh, did we mention that Maxis, the developers of TSO, have started to delete in-world references to The Alphaville Herald?

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Toshiba's new hard drives are the size of a nickel and can store over a gigabyte of data.

The 0.85 inch diameter disk is believed to be the world's smallest hard disk drive that can store about 2 or 3 gigabytes worth of information, company spokeswoman Midori Suzuki said Monday.

Link (via Werblog)

Great commentary by JWZ about the coming RFID wave-to-pay credit-cards:

"I like that it's on your keychain and it's fast to use," said Kristie Beenau, 36, of Peoria, Ariz., who has used ExpressPay for about six months at a CVS Pharmacy and fastfood restaurants. "I charge everything anyways. Now I wave it rather than get my card out. It's more convenient."

I'm going to make a fortune by selling an invention that lets you punch a hole in a credit card so that you can wear it on your keychain. Then later I'll repurpose that invention to let you punch a hole in a $20 bill, so you can wear that on your keychain too!

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Why buy an expensive "media center" PC with lots of DRM that restrict how you can use your own music and movies, when you can hack a cheap Xbox to do the same thing?

"It's a convenience thing," said Phil, whose hacking hobbies discourage him from divulging his full name. "All of my movies are organized into categories, and it's very easy to navigate through the menus to find exactly what I want to watch. I have a PC in the basement of my house which stores all of my music and movies, and the Xbox makes it extremely convenient to use them."

Link (via Gizmodo)