Shonky Stiver Stultiloquence

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Just when you thought the names of episodes couldn’t get any weirder…

• US economy seems to be diving again, hopefully it will not seriously impact the electronics industry.
• If it does, Chris thinks startups will be even more reliant on Angel Investors like Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail)
• Is DIY finally going mainstream, as Wired suggested recently? An article from Futurismic seems to think this is a bad thing and that money coming in will ultimately hurt the "Maker Movement".
• One bad thing could be that people could license their projects as Open Source Hardware (like the Penguino) ... but then not be open!
• One thing that comes with more visibility...money. And the US government is funding small startups, some of which might be OSHW. Modeled after a program at Stanford.
• University of Michigan is also starting a program for burgeoning startups, granting new Masters of Entrepreneurship Degrees.
• Have you ever seen an electronics-inspired license plate out on the road before?

• Embedded Eric sent in the entry he submitted to the Touchstone Semi design contest that is wrapping up. A 4.4 uW 555 clone that can run at 18 Hz. Awesome!
• Shoutouts:
  • Our pal and regular guest, Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm, has a new OSHW Geiger Counter Kit. He'll be showing one off while he's at the Chaos Communication Camp in Berlin.
  • Chris's good friend Dave Young just finished running a program teaching high school kids electronics over 6 weeks. The kids have written up their impressions of the program and they are/will be posted to the Blue Stamp Engineering blog portion of the site.
• Shonky Product of the Week:
  • First pointed out on the EEVblog forums, "Fuel Savers" for cars seem like an utter load of bunk.
  • Forum member oPossum did a great review of a 'popular' one and found a few passives and a linear regulator.
• This Day in Nerd History:
  • Neville Mott passed away in 1996. He was a theoretical physicist who helped discover some key points in metal/oxide transitions in semiconductors. He won the 1977 prize in physics and the "Mott Transition" is named after him.
  • Video of Dr. Mott from 1985, along with many other Nobel Prize winners, is available from the BBC.
• Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, writes about the need for boredom to inspire creativity. Too many devices preclude boredom these days.
• A writer at Gizmodo maintains that creativity is still possible and cites the design of the iPhone as an innovative product. What is the iPhone designer like though?