Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we ran the ultimate Top List, The Top 10 "Top 10 iPhone Flaws" lists; gazed upon true horror; and gaped at Rubik's Mirror.

The big news of the day was, of course, the T-Mobile G1 cell phone, decked out with Google's Android operating system, which totally stole OpenMoko's thunder. Our liveblog coverage has the bullet points, but Joel's hands-on review is where it's at. Will that 1GB monthly data allowance be enough?

Rob demanded a Sony netbook after slobbering over its small-but-pricey Vaio TT; saw that HD movie cam-maker Red is starting the Scarlet over from scratch; tapped his feet on a Webble; and stacked Atom-touting miniature motherboards.

John sat on Hercules' face; wondered if any publicity is good publicity for Vista; grabbed µTorrent for Mac; and spotted earbuds for ladies.

Check out his review of Acer's Aspire X3200 mini-desktop PC. Prost!

Fleet Foxes and Wilco covered Bob Dylan's "I Shall be Released" at a recent live show, and they're giving it away online if you promise to vote. Wilcoworld (via James Home on Twitter; photo of guitar rack on-stage at Wilco's set during Outside Lands via Crowdfire; image by John Battelle).

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has word of artist artist Wayne Martin Belger's sculpture, "Third Eye," a pinhole camera in a human skull:

Wayne Martin Belger makes pinhole cameras using a variety of materials including precious stones, metals, human organs, and bone. This piece, entitled Third Eye, features many of these materials, all constructed around the 150 year-old skull of a 13 year-old girl. The film is exposed to light through titular ocular cavity making a Polaroid momento mori. The photos taken with this camera (one of which is after the jump) stay with the theme, their blurriness and patina making them look as if they were snatched from the memories of the dead.

Pinhole Camera Fashioned From 150 Year-Old Skull Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets)

Convincing work from consumer research groups suggests that video games are recession-proof earners:

Gaming fans shopping recently at a Best Buy in San Francisco echoed Riley's words; Malou Taylor says she's more likely to play a game than go to a movie.

"I might as well use the money on a game that I can have for a longer time," she says...

Though video games initially earned a bad rap for being something of a loner activity, gaming has become an increasingly sociable event. Some couples, like Benjamin Gerald and Char Williams, say they stay home together and play.

"Last night, we spent, like, six hours," Gerald says. "Char was playing the game, and I'm sitting on the couch next to her ... I'm totally involved, even though I'm not even playing the thing."

Um, yah -- and then there's this little thing called "massively multiplayer games" you guys mighta heard of? In Tough Economic Times, Video Games Console (via Guardian Games)

I'm getting deluged with email from people who are involved in projects resonant with some of the "open source" posts I've done so far. Some of them are really cool.

Open Source Democracy: Check out this book, Rebooting America, put together by the folks who did the Personal Democracy Forum this summer. It's a collection of essays offering ideas of how to energize democracy in the age of the Internet. My contribution is atypical and maybe less useful than the others, because I argue that the behavior we learn on the Internet is best a metaphor for participatory democracy than its ultimate realizations. But there are entirely more practical and immediate strategies offered by politics and net luminaries from Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs) and Scott Heifferman (Meetup.com) to Newt Gingrich and Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody). Best yet, the entire book is available online here.

Open Source Groceries. At least that's what Open Produce looks like to me. A new grocery store in Chicago that promises sustainable practices, community involvement, and total transparency. "We focus on sustainable food production, whether that be organic growing methods, local production, or efficient transportation. Our company also strives to set new standards of transparency and accountability to the community; everything about our operation, from our financial data to where our produce was grown, will be available on this website or in our store."

Open Source Money There's a lot of books emerging on the use of complementary and local currencies. I got a ton of email on this subject already, from people concerned that I'm referring to scrip or the kinds of currencies used in the US prior to the 1930's. If the brilliant and free Bernard Latier text I recommended was too involved, there's a book I've just been made aware of that looks at some of the more practical implications of creating a community money supply called Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, by Thomas H. Greco. If you don't have five bucks for the paperback, there's an abridged PDF here.

Sports Illustrated is running this photo of the amazingly talented gymnast Shawn Johnson. She's standing on a balance beam in a corn field. The creepy fingers coming out of the corn in the lower left make the photo seem like an ad for a scary movie. Creepy fingers in Sports Illustrated photo (via Photoshop Disasters)

Looks like the last Dorkbot-Austin meeting was bloody fantastic. Here's a nice photo gallery of the attendees, shot by David Weaver. (It's not real blood -- it's just a gore cannon.) The A-List: Dorkbot at Cafe Mundi

Jackhammer Jill's intelligent designers eBoy teamed up with KidRobot to create this wonderful Hugh Hefner PEECOL. The Hef PEECOL is 3 inches tall and will sell for $9.95.
Hugh Hefner PEECOL (KidRobot)

Previously on BB:
• New eBoy PEECOL figures
• Laptop skins from eBoy and other artists

In MAKE Vol. 15, George Dyson, who writes the Retrospect column, looked at the mortgage meltdown.

The roots of the current financial meltdown can be found in John von Neumann’s model of general economic equilibrium, first developed in 1932. Von Neumann elucidated the behavior of an expanding, autocatalytic economy where “goods are produced not only from ‘natural factors of production,’ but ... from each other,” and he proved the coexistence of equilibrium and expansion using the saddle-point topology of convex sets. Some of his assumptions — such as that “the natural factors of production, including labour, can be expanded in unlimited quantities” and that “all income in excess of necessities of life will be reinvested” — appeared unrealistic to others at the time, less so now that Moore’s Law and the zero-cost replication of information are driving the economy of today. Other assumptions, such as an invariant financial clock cycle, are conservative under the conditions now in play.

Von Neumann, who made seminal contributions to digital computing, left a number of distinct monuments to his abbreviated career, among them his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (with Oskar Morgenstern) and his Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (with Arthur Burks). Synthesis between these two regimes is now advancing so quickly that no unified theory of the economics of self-reproducing systems has been able to keep up. Periodic instability should come as no surprise. We may be on the surface of a balloon. Or in the saddle of a dynamic equilibrium — we hope.

Can you have your house and spend it too?