Into the Void

Sharp Deutschland: 108 Zoll: Sharp präsentiert den größten LCD-TV der Welt

Say no More.

National Geographic Self-powered Emergency Radio

Every summer, Mr. X does what he calls “The Gathering of the Flashlights.” A leftover habit from our Philadelphia Folk Festival and camping days, The Gathering is Mr. X’s ritual of collecting all the flashlights in the house and replacing batteries and bulbs.

Well, National Geographic emailed me an ad for the gem pictured above - the National Geographic Self-powered Emergency Radio. What self-respecting engineer wouldn’t want a flashlight with a hand-crank? Let’s face it, folks, Green is more than a bumper sticker. 90-seconds of cranking gives an hour worth of battery for the radio. No fumbling in drawers in the dark trying to find the right size battery.

Ok, so National Geographic is more impressed with the radio aspect. And it’s a cell phone battery charger. It even gets international shortwave radio bands.

Oh, get this - it also has a red flashing beacon and a siren.

I think I’ll get the National Geographic Self-powered Emergency Radio for Mr. X’s birthday.

Fortunately he has no interest in anything other than flashlights so he’s not likely to read this.

Create your very own Semacode tag.

What is Semafox? Semafox is an easy way to create a smart 2D barcode (aka a semacode) using your web browser. There’s nothing to install or uninstall. Bonus… the QRCode reader from KAYWA can decode it.

As always, my search for this item resulted in something totally unexpected, in this case a Ruby on Rails book called BLiXy’s PREDOMINATELY IMPROMPTU big book of cryable, injectible ruby. Oddly enough, it is a Ruby tutorial in comic book format. This is a sample entitled When You Wish Upon a Beard.

MYTAGO - do magic with your phone

Yes, it’s Yet Another Meatspace Tag. This one requires a free membership to get the tags. Seems like a bit of a privacy hassle.

MYTAGO is a little different from QRCode or Shotcode. There’s no phone app. Instead, take a picture of the tag and use one of these methods to get the tag data -a bookmark and description:

• Take a picture of the tag image. Next time you sync your phone to your PC, upload the jpeg image to the MYTAGO site to get the tag data.
• Enter the URL of an online tag image and get the tag data.
• Type the 12 digit code from a tag image into the MYTAGO site to get the tag data.
• Install an Uploader Tool on your PC.
• Email the tag image or the 12-digit tag code to yourusername@mytago.com with your PIN as the email subject line. The tag data will be available next time you log into MYTAGO.

http://www.laptop.org/

It’s here, the ideal gift for early adopters.

We’ve been hearing about the $100 Laptop for months now. It seemed like a pipe dream. A laptop for children in third world countries? It would have to be an engineering marvel. The kids often live in houses with dirt floors. They often don’t have electricity. Internet infrastructure - or even telephone service - is non-existent in rural towns. They’ve probably never seen a computer before. They’ll have to learn the OS and the software without the a priori assumptions of a Westerner. Getting computer teachers trained has to be a logistical nightmare! How can this possibly work?

The answer is one that wouldn’t occur to most of us… Cooperation on a global scale!

It’s the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. This program attempted to design, build and distribute laptops for under $100 to children in third world countries.

In December OLPC had a promotion where if you donated a laptop you could buy a second laptop. PLUS you get a year of free Sprint wifi access at places like Barnes & Noble, St*rbucks, etc. that you can also use with any other wifi devices you may own - laptops and PDAs. The Sprint access alone is worth the price of the laptop.

The XO has totally new hardware with VERY low power consumption. The XO has a very cool GUI called “Sugar” that’s usuable even by kids who can’t read yet, much less read English. Sugar is based on a trimmed down Linux OS with programs written just for it. Programs like a music synthesizer, Turtle Graphics, word processing, a web browser and that’s just the START of it!

Since The XO is intended for third world countries, it has wifi - no ethernet infrastructure is necessary. They’ll automatically connect at power up to other XOs that they find. This enables the kids to work on collaborative projects. Not just chatrooms, but writing music together in the music workspace! Collaboration is the key to the future.

The XO has two antennas and uses them to triangulate and display a 2D map of surrounding XOs and wireless access points. It took a while and I had to change some of my router settings, but I was able to connect to the Internet with my XO.

There is an available hand crank to charge the XO if you don’t have electricity in your village. I think they said there’s a solar battery charger available too. They also have wireless teacher access points that enable the kids to get on the Internet and see what’s going on in the rest of the world. This is a really ambitious project. I did what I could.

I’ll post an update if the Give One - Get One program runs again. Your donation is partly tax deductible. And you’re doing something good for less fortunate kids. It’s a win-win game.

In WWII the Germans ran into Russia killing everyone they found. They destroyed entire villages, an entire way of life. In some parts of Russia 1 in 4 people died. Every family was affected.

However, the Germans awakened a sleeping giant. And when U.S. General George Patton realized just how big Russia was, he wanted our army to march right through Germany and into Russia to get at them while they were still recovering from Germany’s predations. There was a big antisemitic component to this that I don’t wish to go into at this time.

Remember that at the same time we were taking back Europe, we were also fighting in the Pacific theater. Japan was throwing Mitsubishi Zeros at us - yup, made by the same company that makes cars and Three Diamonds tuna. The kamakazi pilots literally committed suicide by ramming our ships with planes. They had already been at war with China for years before Pearl Harbor and they were pretty much tapped out.

Kamakazi means “divine wind” after a Chinese attack that was thwarted by high winds in the Sea of Japan.

Despite the fact that we had pretty much won against Japan, in 1949 we dropped atomic bombs on two important cities. Not on the Mitsubishi plant where Zeros were manufactured but a few miles away on a city full of civilians.

Why???

To impress the Russians that we were technologically superior.

The Russians hurried up to create their own atomic bomb. We upgraded to hydrogen bombs, which use an atomic bomb as an igniter. Russia upgraded.

The government created a big Communism scare to get the American people to fund this massive effort. We used smaller nations as proxies to test our technology against other countries that acted as Russia’s proxies.

We engaged in a “space race” that started with Russia’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and culminated in our first steps on the moon in 1969.

Both of us developed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems (ICBMs) to deliver nukes. We both developed sophisticated anti-nuke systems to shoot down ICBMs. We had enough missiles to destroy each other 30 times over - this is called “overkill.”

In 1962, JFK had a standoff with Russia’s Khrushchev over missile sites in Cuba, just 90 miles away from the US. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we ever came to Thermonuclear Armageddon.

In the 1980’s President Reagan wanted to fill the sky with killer satellites. My favorite idea was “Rods of God,” in which satellites would carry up huge titanium rods that they could drop out of the sky on our enemies. These people were so wrapped up in it that they’d destroy the world if they had to.

Needless to say, we had a worldwide spy network to keep tabs on all this.

Fortunately for us, and devastatingly for the citizens of the USSR, they ran out of money before we did. I guess that means we won, but winning put the US so far in debt to foreign investors that we’ll still be paying it for another generation.

War, even a Cold War, is expensive.

That’s the cold war, the technological rivalry. We never actually fired a shot at each other, but we spent 40 years trying to prove our cajones were bigger than theirs.

Putin seems to trying to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. This time around, we’ve already thrown billions of dollars at the non-war in the Middle East and it is crumbling our economy. I don’t know where it will go.

Technorati: Kamakazi divine+wind Mitsubishi+Zero Three+Diamonds WWI atomic+bomb cold+war Nazi General+Patton Hiroshima Nagasaki sputnik Intercontinental+Ballistic+Missile ICBM communism+scare space+race Soviet+Union

Popular Science: Nano-Pollution: No Tiny Issue?

I’m an electrical engineer and a born skeptic, but through the years the medical profession has shown a particularly unscientific streak when it comes to identifying and treating new illnesses.

I have been worried about the environmental and medical effects of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is a catch-all phrase that describes microscopic man-made objects. These come in many shapes and sizes - soccer-ball-shaped cages made of 20 carbon atoms, nanotubes the thickness of a hair. These objects persist in the environment after they’ve been used and disposed of. There has been little, if any, investigation into the effect of exposure to environmental nanotechnology.

Please consider the possibility that some, if not all, cases of Morgellons are the result of exposure to tiny man-made objects. These objects can lodge almost invisibly in the skin, causing unexplained lesions. Larger nanotubes or groups of smaller ones may appear to be fibers. Many of these objects are so small that when inhaled they are carried directly into the brain using the same pathways as smells do.

Nanotechnological pollution is on the horizon. I think Morgellons is the earliest indication of what we can all expect from this technology.

It took many years for the Powers That Be to recognize the danger of asbestos. Nanotechnology is still in its infancy and not much investigation has been done into effects on the environment or on the human body. So far the environment isn’t filled with these things. The particles are molecular in size, much smaller than asbestos. In my professional opinion, this research must start *now* rather than after the technology is entrenched.

I also wanted to point out something. Everywhere I read about Morgellons online, sufferers of this mysterious illness were slathering themselves with lotions and creams to try to calm the itching. Well, nanotechnology is being used as a carrier for emollients and other cosmetic ingredients. Anywhere you see words like “microencapsulated” there is some kind of nanotechnology. Please consider creating a list of safe lotions (if there can be such a thing).

I’m not affiliated with any skin cream manufacturers either. There is a list of products containing nanotechnology online somewhere, probably on the CRN. I leave it to you folks to look into it.

I do, of course, consider that Morgellons may not be due to nanotechnology at all, but to histological incompatibility.

BTW, talc is similar to asbestos in many ways. Talc is one of the hardest substances known to man. I’m a bit suspicious of talc too. I’ve long since switched to corn starch.

Technorati: ology Morgellons asbestos microencapsulated

I signed up with a site called Outside.in a few months ago and they turned me down because I don’t have enough geotag info in my blog, i.e. I write about ideas rather than local coverage. I guess they figured out that nobody interesting is going to geotag every post.

Now Outside.in has changed things so that they can read a feed and include only items with geographical information in them.

Testing Hatboro, PA.

Something about my paycheck was sitting at the edge of my awareness. I took a closer look and found that the line I sign my name on is actually a line of small text.

Click the picture above for a close-up.

Mr. Ratan N. Tata, Chairman of the Tata Group and Tata Motors, today unveiled the Tata ‘NANO’ - The People’s Car from Tata Motors that India and the world have been looking forward to. A development, which signifies a first for the global automobile industry, the People’s Car brings the comfort and safety of a car within the reach of thousands of families. The People’s Car will be launched in India later in 2008.

“I observed families riding on two-wheelers – the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family. Tata Motors’ engineers and designers gave their all for about four years to realise this goal. Today, we indeed have a People’s Car, which is affordable and yet built to meet safety requirements and emission norms, to be fuel efficient and low on emissions. We are happy to present the People’s Car to India and we hope it brings the joy, pride and utility of owning a car to many families who need personal mobility.”
– Mr. Ratan N. Tata, Chairman of the Tata Group and Tata Motors, speaking at the unveiling ceremony at the 9th Auto Expo in New Delhi.

technical info to follow…