September 2010
2 posts
6 tags
Dual Purpose Racks
Have a rack of IBM servers that you feel could be doing a greater service to the world than hosting your network resources? Well, your ship is just about to come in! IBM will soon be looking for partners to experiment with mining accelerometer data from server hard drives to pinpoint and predict earthquakes.
Makes you feel lazy just thinking about how ingenious IBM’s engineers are,...
6 tags
Mobile Multitude
An important point made by The Economist online: the rise of mobile telephony in developing countries is about to give way to an even more transformative rise in mobile internet access.
What does this mean? In places like India, Brazil, China, etc, a population that has never had access to the web is about to burst on to the scene using cheap, readily available mobile devices, unleashing 1...
August 2010
3 posts
5 tags
Know The Students
The New York Times has published a rather lengthy article on the concept of a new developmental stage known as “emerging adulthood.” The hallmarks of this proposed addition to birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood is a constant sense of limitless potential, a meandering attitude towards committing to a particular path towards that potential and a disinterest in setting to work on...
5 tags
Connecting Experience to Place
“Stories are going to be pinned to a physical location so that in 20 years our children will go to Ocean Beach and their phone will tell them this is the place their parents had their first kiss, and here’s the picture they took afterward, and here’s what their friends had to say,” Cox said.
Nauseau-inducing anecdote aside, Facebook’s new Places functionality is perhaps one of the...
4 tags
Little Matchbox World
I guarantee you that if someone had given me the technology when I was a child, I would have made something very similar to this with my enormous Hot Wheels/Matchbox collection (except it may have also involved a car wash.)
Tumblingerstraße from yo man on Vimeo.
(Via Jalopnik)
July 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Another Take on Rephotography
Gizmodo refers to them as time portals, but they are actually the rephotographic work of Russian artist Sergey Larenkov. Mixing modern day street scenes with their World War II counterparts creates a spooky history lesson by showing the ghosts of a city’s past. A very powerful example of this art form.
3 tags
Rephotography Gets Automated
Do you know what rephotography is? I didn’t, either but the concept is fantastic and I’m glad there is a term just for it. Rephotography is the process of taking a photo in the exact same location as another photo, but at another time. And now MIT has figured out a way to use computers to display old photos on top of new scenes. So, imagine your digital camera or iPad offering...
4 tags
Blogetry Goes Dark
Blogging service, Blogetry, has been completely taken offline - by the FBI. Some 70,000 users were given no notice other than a failed connection as they attempted to log in to their blogs this week. All of this seems to be stemming from a mandated shut down involving Blogetry’s hosting provider, BurstNET. After having been approached by the FBI with claims that Blogetry sites contained...
4 tags
West Ashefield, Third Floor Tube Station
Wait - third floor tube station you say? If a simulator counts as a real station then yes. And this one certainly goes for broke. Speakers pump the sounds of trains and other real audio while magazine stands and paper boxes are stocked. Apparently it’s used to train station employees but I think those tracks lead to another dimension. Doctor Who can’t be far off the mark, can...
June 2010
4 posts
4 tags
InfraRAD, Perhaps
Gorgeous photography of trees captured with an infrared camera. I’ve truly never seen anything quite like it.
Or maybe I have.
(Via Treehugger)
4 tags
Twentysomething Children
“We have not developed and strengthened institutions to serve young adults,” Mr. Furstenberg said, “because we’re still living with the archaic idea that people enter adulthood in their late teens or early 20s.”
From The New York Times, as shared with me by Nancy, on the topic of the lengthening road to adulthood.
I know I had a relatively a-typical transition from childhood into...
4 tags
How Well Do You Multitask?
A Facebook friend of mine has just recently posted an article from the New York Times entitled “Your Brain on Computers.” The story looks at the ways in which information saturation has begun to rewire the brains of heavy technology users. It also discusses multitasking - specifically how effectiveness flags as more tasks are piled on top of one another. There’s even an online...
5 tags
Redesign BP's Logo
Sent to me from Nancy, this Flickr group started by Greenpeace UK is asking users to submit their redesigned BP logos. From the description:
BP claim that they are ‘beyond petroleum’. But this is a company that is up to it’s neck in the dirtiest oil going.
Their nice green logo doesn’t really seem to fit them too well, so we’re running a competition to find a...
May 2010
5 posts
3 tags
Ye Olde Jobs
A London lamplighter circa 1935
Graduation season is upon us, leaving hundreds of newly minted diplomas in the hands of adults across the country. Adults who have absolutely no idea where to find a job nine times out of ten. There are plenty of places on the web that will tell you what the hottest new opportunities for employment are, but only NPR has put together a gallery of jobs of a...
6 tags
How important is a clean screen?
Is it worth paralysis? Nerve damage? If you happen to own an iPhone, that shiny glass screen that greeted you in the box may have indirectly caused just that. According to a new lawsuit filed in China against Wintek, a supplier for Apple and other tech companies, 44 workers have asked for compensation after being forced to clean glass screen with a known toxic chemical, n-hexane. While the...
8 tags
“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations - none of which I know how to...”
– President Obama in his commencement address to Hampton University
Does no one else find it marginally alarming that the president - who is by no means old, uneducated or unskilled - admits to not knowing how to operate some of the most influential devices in the world? Norway’s President...
5 tags
The BP Oil Slick
One southern man has flown over the BP oil slick and reports back via YouTube what he saw:
It is hard to criticize an oil spill while flying in a fuel-powered plane, but this is certainly telling footage of the level of disaster BP and the people of the region are facing.
The latest on the BP oil spill.
(Thanks, io9)
5 tags
Dusting the Smart Way
You can now add the “toner wars” to the list of concepts from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age made reality. At least in part - while not the intelligent nanobots he envisioned, the “smart dust” planned for deployment by HP sure does seem similar. Aimed at becoming a neural network for the entire planet, the tiny sensors do hold the promise of keeping us more...
April 2010
4 posts
4 tags
DARPA Wants Transformers
No, not the robots in disguise. Instead, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for a new flying car that can both operate as a ground-based SUV and a vertical take off aircraft. The government agency is asking for proposals for a $54 million program that will make a Transformer, as they are calling the concept, a reality by 2015.
Discovery News has a video with several...
6 tags
Air/Port Capitalizes on Melting Ice
A concept design at this point, the Air/Port project is an effort to build a commercial hub near the Northwest Passage that will allow for a landing strip and a shipping port. The dual design will allow for existing air traffic to connect with the Port Churchill community while the Port component will take advantage of warmer global weather and the new sea routes it provides. In addition,...
6 tags
Hope Those Tweets Are Good
Because all of them are going to be archived at the Library of Congress. The LoC has just acquired the entire archive of Twitter’s public messages and will be storing them digitally for posterity. Research into the human condition can now commence 160 characters at a time. To quote Ars Technica:
The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that...
7 tags
Lit House Director on the BBC
Professor of poetry, author and Literary House Director, Mark Nowak appeared on BBC America’s World News program last night to discuss the current mining disasters in West Virginia and China. Mark, who writes extensively about mines and their employees via his book and blog, Coal Mountain Elementary, was a natural fit for the news segment since he literally calls our attention to yet...
March 2010
7 posts
4 tags
Google vs. China: Round 3
Well, that lasted marginally longer than expected: Google’s services in China are entirely blocked for all intents and purposes. As reported by The Daily Mail, Google’s rerouting of Chinese searches through Hong Kong has officially been blocked by the Chinese government. Users who attempt to access Google now are seeing results that include a reset internet connection and an error...
7 tags
Libraries Cuts = Budget Fixes
It seems that, no matter what, public services like libraries, museums, parks and the like are the first to suffer and the hardest hit during budgetary crises. And since we are a nation wracked with deficit after deficit from town to town, we are seeing many, many of these arts, culture and recreation centers shutting their doors. As pointed out by this LA Times article, closing a library will...
3 tags
Google vs. China: Round 2
Google has officially closed its google.cn search engine and has begun rerouting traffic to google.hk (Google Hong Kong.) In so doing, Google is attempting to circumvent China’s required censorship measures.
And - as would be expected - China is already making countermoves to block Google’s workaround. Reports are stating that google.hk is being blocked for mainland China’s...
6 tags
Environmentalism's Roots
As Nancy often reminds me, environmentalism is not a new concept. The “green” revolution actually kicked off in earnest in the 1960s and 70s - heard of hippies or Earth Day? Our modern take on environmental activism and awareness is more a rediscovery and reinvigoration of what was already started.
To celebrate this history, Wired Science just posted a story covering the emergence...
6 tags
3 tags
4 tags
Cultural Moment
BBC- Poetry Season
As their tagline says, “let poetry into your life.”
