My wish for next Christmas :-)

via mwelab.com

For years I have been talking about building something like this and now a company is actually making it. This one is pretty nice, but even as their basic model, it comes at a price tag of $6300. Their slicker and custom one is over 40 grand!

It has most of what I want, but is missing a few needed features. In particular “zero gravity” relax your back reclining mode and a “stand up” mode. Also, for home office use, I wonder if building it out of wood may be a lot cheaper.

The neighborhood is getting crowded!

via news.ku.dk

Looks like little ole Earth may not be quite as unique as we thought. Based on this study there are plenty of planets to form the “Federation”. Now if we can just get past that pesky issue of building an FTLL drive.

Dinosaur-Like Tails Make Terrestrial Mobile Robots More Agile

via spectrum.ieee.org

Always wondered why cats have such mid-air dexterity, then check this out. Fairly obvious when you read it (i.e. using the tail to counter angular momentum), but it leads to lots of interesting applications for robots.

The future of eBooks

This company TouchPress has produced an interesting book on minerals.

It gives one a view on where the future of books might be going. One question is why we haven’t seen these on the web. I.e. your web browser could easily show a book like this as well and there are some flash sites like it. The issue comes down to money. It costs a lot of money to make a not only beautiful and informative but also interactive book. eBooks are that way to make money that just seems to have been missed in a world of the web where ads rule.

Posted via email from Pillows Ponderings

Organovo – Organ Bio-printers

In a previous blog entry, I posted a TED video on organ “printing”. Here’s the company commercializing the research: Organovo. I predict this to big a HUGE industry. Between this and robotic surgeons, we may be bale to bring down the cost of more expensive life threatening procedures and help reduce the impact on MediaCare reserves.

At Annual Convention, Chemists Warm to Cold Fusion\

At Annual Convention, Chemists Warm to Cold Fusion | Popular Science.

Looks like cold fusion is making a big comeback. Better Li Ion batteries, cool new solar cell tech and now this. Seems like lots of energy is around the corner…

With Skinput, Your Body Is Your Keyboard

With Skinput, Your Body Is Your Keyboard

Who knew than when you touch your skin or tap your fingers that measurable transverse and longitudinal waves transmit along your skin. These can be measured and turned into input device information. Combined with a pico projector you arm and hands can be used for full input/output.

David Blaine: How he held my breath for 17 min

A fascinating video on how far we can push the limits of our bodies. I would not have even guessed that 17 minutes for holding ones breath was possible. Most of his doctors agreed, yet he did it and even had the doctors help document it. Spoiler…part of the way this is accomplished is to infuse the blood with extra O2 before the attempt. That makes it no less interesting, but less available to the mere mortal. There have been several other articles on the feasibility of respiratory nanobots, respirocytes that could travel through your bloodstream and infuse it with oxygen allowing you to go very long without actually “breathing”.

David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 min | Video on TED.com.

Microsoft demos mobile Surface 3D interface

This is perhaps where touch phones and tablets will be heading. Watch the video, it’s an interesting demo. Now if we can just figure out how to do real-time holography and paint the screen in the air…well, that would be even cooler!

Microsoft demos mobile Surface 3D interface | Electronista.

George Whitesides: A lab the size of a postage stamp | Video on TED.com

This some wonderful  out-of-the-box thinking.  George Whitesides: A lab the size of a postage stamp | Video on TED.com has developed postage stamp sized pieces of paper with miniature “diagnostic labs” on them. They think they can get them down to 10 cents per stamp (or test)!

Printing body parts: Making a bit of me | The Economist

Another nice article on the Wake Forst work on printing organs:

Printing body parts: Making a bit of me | The Economist.

Technology Review: Blogs: Potential Energy: DOE Funds Huge Solar Project

Looks like our govt. is finally getting behind solar. 400 megawatts is a good start!

Technology Review: Blogs: Potential Energy: DOE Funds Huge Solar Project.

Jetlev Flyer – Way Cooler Than Water Skiing!

Home – Jetlev Flyer.

This looks like a blast and possibly a very good way to hurt oneself too

Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+ | Video on TED.com

Inspring and informative.  Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+ | Video on TED.com.

They study “blue zones”, places on the planet with a preponderance of people over the age of 100 and try to determine how they got that way.

After watching the video, answer this question, “why do you get up in the morning”?

YouTube – Anthony Atala at TEDMED 2009 – Printing New Organs

Simply amazing. Watch this research on the progress they have made in growing and printing organs.

YouTube – Anthony Atala at TEDMED 2009.

Nvidia touts rapid GPU performance boost – 570x in 6 years!

Tons of computing power!

A “stand up economist”? Entertaining….

Watch it here….

Scientists stop the ageing process (ABC News in Science)

See:

Cooperation Beats Selfishness, at Least in Theory

George Carlin versus Mark Twain

An interesting link on George Carlin and Mark Twain.  If you are a fan of either check it out.

Lamarckian Evolution Returns

A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?

So, what does this mean for genetic programming and grammatical evolution.  New things to ponder!  Our offspring are no longer subject just to our genetic traits, but that of our growth as an adolescent?

Testing from ScriberFire

A test post from ScribeFire

Testing FeedBurner Email Subscriptions

FeedBurner is an awesome way to enhance your blog and effectively add an email list at no cost to you. Check it out.

Looks like the “War of the Worlds” robot ship to me!

Check out this page on a new tri-ped robot. Make sure to watch the video off you-tube.  Awesome!

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Take a cruise on an airship!

Look at this cool new airship design and imagine future cruises in the air.  Shades of sci-fi!

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Attack of the giant pumkpins!

Check out this years winner of the pumpkin contest.  It doesn’t beat the record, but I had no idea they could grow so large!

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Who “invented” zombies?

Nope it wasn’t George Romero with “Night of the Living Dead. It wasn’t even old classic horror movies.  Rather, it’s part of Haitian folklore and voodoo.  read more here at Yahoo.

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Free web based alternative to Quicken?

This looks pretty promising as a web based free alternative to Quicken to help you manage your money.

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Things to do when you’re a bored developer

So you’re bored coding and need some ideas to get you juiced.  Check out this blog entry.  Several I hadn’t heard of/thought of.

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The benifits of being a programmer

The counter side to my last blog, this article shows the good things that come from being a programmer.  Ahhh, I feel better now!

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Programming Can Ruin Your Life?

Eeeks, a somewhat depressing, but very revealing (at least for me) brief essay on how programming can affect your life. Actually more of a description of what programming does to your brain and your approach to life. Like that old commercial, “This is your brain…this is your brain on programming”.  I did find several interesting self revelations in it though.  If you are a programmer, you’ll I’m sure find traits that match you!

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The Universal Information Client

This is what I really want to handle all my info.  All my information managed and easily search-able, etc. in one place.  Lots of wonderful ideas in this package. Make sure to give Haystack a look.  Check out the overview and publications.  It looks like development has slowed or stopped on it however

“Haystack is a tool designed to let individuals manage all
their information in ways that make the most sense to them. By
removing arbitrary barriers created by applications that handle only
certain information “types” and that record only a fixed set of
relationships defined by the developer, we aim to let users define
whichever arrangements of, connections between, and views of
information they find most effective. Such
personalization of information management will dramatically improve
everyone’s ability to find what they need when they need it.”

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Exhibit 2.0 – Create interactive data-rich web pages like these ones below without ever touching a database or a web server, or doing any programming

This look useful!  A way of building rich information presentation apps without any coding.  Are you in marketing and want to highlight in a graphical form information you’ve dug up? Give Exhibit a try.  Afterwards, check out the general site for these guys, they’re doing fascinating work on information management.

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Making your browsing experience so much better

I have been lately very fond of an application from Microsoft called “OneNote”.  When I look at how I use it, it’s mostly for keeping web clippings and searching of those.  I’ve lately converted from using IE7 to FireFox almost exclusively (IE7 would crash after having something like 30 tabs open, not a rare thing for me). It’s has spell checking (needed for my terrible typing) and and amazing plethora of useful plugins. I fact, this one, Scrapbook, has almost replaced my use/need of OneNote.

Rather than book mark anything while surfing, I now “capture” whole pages.  Scrapbook is unique in that it stores the original URL, so that you can open your “local” copy, or head back to the original on the web.  It has great searching facilities, allows you to create your own HTML notes, annotate your saved web pages, post edit saved web pages to get rid of ads and content you don’t want, stores the pages in non-proprietary straight HTML (very important!!!), has tons of add-ons ,  and many other features, and is FREE!  Run, don’t walk, and go get yourself a copy of this.

In my daily surfing, I use these  two other great tools too.

Wizz RSS Reader for FireFox for all my blog reading.  It’s FREE too, and works pretty well.  I can think of a few things I’d do different, so time for me to send in a donation and a feature request.

Once you’ve added in all these cool sidebar tools, you’ll want a better way to view them than the simplistic sidebar facility that FireFox has.  Plugins to the rescue!  Check out All-In-One Sidebar and you’ll be in sidebar bliss.

Now you may asking, “but Brad, how do you get these blog entries posted so quickly”. Alas, ScribeFire comes to the rescue!  It’s a blog editor hosted inside FireFox (yes, another plugin).  It’s simple and works great and again is FREE.

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DIY Segway

Instructions on how to build your own.

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Good programming strat for noobs

Check out this site that has an interesting IDE for noob/wannb programmers.  Its’ a very visual way to program and create visual output. A greta place for kids to start learning programming too.

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:) = Health + Money + Social Life + Meaning

There’s now a wiki on Scott Adams “happiness formula”.  Fun!

Check it out: http://happinessformula.pbwiki.com/

FYI, this was blogged via the ScribeFire add-in for FireFox.

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Superlightcar – the succesor to the SmartCar?

Quoted from http://www.superlightcar.com/public/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1:

Superlightcar – Home page

SuperLIGHT-CAR introduction SuperLIGHT-CAR is a collaborative Research & Development project co-funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme. In SuperLIGHT-CAR, 38 leading organizations from 9 european countries work together to bring lightweight automotive technologies closer to high volume car production. SuperLIGHT-CAR has a multi-material philosophy, striving to use for each part the best material and manufacturing processes in terms of weight and cost minimization, while fulfilling a wide range of automotive requirements in areas such as stiffness, crash performance, fatigue and corrosion resistance, etc.

Bring back the dirigibles!

Quoted from http://www.dynalifter.com/:

Can dirigibles make a comback?

News: Ohio Airships close to landing $4.09B contract for 38 Dynalifter Freighters

Thre legged bots!

Interesting… I’ve seen a three leged dog, but never a three legged bot.

Quoted from http://geneticargonaut.blogspot.com/2007/05/racing-with-evolutionary-algorithms.html:

Genetic Argonaut: Racing With Evolutionary Algorithms

Racing With Evolutionary Algorithms

Backpack Calendar

Interesting online calender:

 

Backpack Calendar

Moving Your Eyes Improves Memory, Study Suggests

Quoted from http://www.livescience.com/health/070425_eyes_memory.html:

LiveScience.com: Moving Your Eyes Improves Memory, Study Suggests

Moving Your Eyes Improves Memory, Study Suggests

 

When you least expect it, shift happens!

Here’s an interesting video, more of a presentation actually on some interesting numbers that may boggle your mind.  The net of the presentation harkens back to Ray Kurzweil and other who speak of the exponential growth of knowledge in the times we live in and the dramatic effects just a few years of that growth may entail.

See it here:

http://www.flixxy.com/technology-and-education.htm

 

Retrocausality or the art of changing the past

So the universe just keeps getting weirder.  Check out this article on retrocausality. If that’s not strange enough, let look into the theory that the universe is just a big computer and that the reality we experience is just it’s simulation.  Shades of “The Matrix”, eh?  Check out these books on that very topic:

• Seth Lloyd, “Programming The Universe”
• Charles Seife, “Decoding The Universe”

Tired of programming in C++, VB, C#, Java, or whatever?  Try your hand at programming the universe!

 

 

Stargate Replicators?

Wow, these robots look a lot like the Replicators on Stargate. Check ‘em out!

Biomemetics – learning engineering from mother nature

Fascinating web site on what we can learn from Gecko’s, cockroaches, etc.

http://www.stanford.edu/~sangbae/

make sure to watch the iSprawl video. Amazing and makes one definitely think of how a cockroach moves.

 

Another technology challenge with a prize – $25 million!

Feb. 9 – Virgin boss Richard Branson is offering a $25 million prize for the best way of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.

The Virgin Earth Challenge has the backing of distinguished environment campaigners including former US vice – president Al Gore.

Check the video out here:

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=6672&src=020907_1444_ARTICLE_PROMO_also_on_reuters

SplashCast – another way to do blogs, sort of, video style

Yet another way to do video on the web.  Th idea here is to create your own customized video “channel” for others to watch.  I.e. if you’re into yoga, then hunt up various videos (say on YouTube), pictures, etc. and “publish” them in your channel.  Others can then subscribe to it.  Sort of a player variation on blogging.  Check out here at:

http://www.splashcastmedia.com/

Engineers Design New ‘Origami’ Optics

“The ultrathin optical system could be used in camera phones and other extremely compact imaging devices.”

No more long and bulky lenses?  Yeah!

http://www.popphoto.com/photonews/3735/engineers-design-new-origami-optic.html

Floating on nothing!

Cool video of a small aluminum foil “ship” floating on “nothing” (thanks Steve!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PJTq2xQiQ0#