Category Archives: Tech

Sleep is a sickness

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Did you know that every human on the planet actually collapses and becomes inert, rarely moving for hours at a time every day?  It’s not just you.  Our metabolism slows, we can’t do anything useful and we are generally unresponsive to external stimuli.  By all accounts this epidemic has raged for as long as we have written history, and maybe even longer.

Fortunately, we have science to save us from this horrible horrible condition.  Apparently they have finally developed a drug that keeps you awake when you snort it, and it’s not cocaine.  There’s no apparent side effects, apart from the uncontrollable feeling of smugness that comes from not needing to sleep.  Thank heavens.  The only downside is they will only give it to monkeys so far.  Damn smug monkeys, they always get the best stuff.

Have a read for yourself.

Onion-worthy news

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Some things just write themselves. This Canoe article looks like it came right from the pages of The Onion. A Dunkin Donuts worker clocks a guy robbing the store with a coffee mug because he was worried he might look like a dork on Youtube if he didn’t.

“There are only a few videos like that on YouTube now, so mine’s going to be the best,” he said. “That’ll teach this guy.”

It’s interesting how this connected world of ever increasing surveillance is changing our behaviour, even in times of stress. I can’t honestly say I would be all that worried about Youtube myself. Maybe I’m just an old fart?

Cells with frickin LASER BEAMS

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Faithful reader Wilson sent a link my way yesterday about how bio-tech is getting so good, scientist can create new custom cells by effectively programming their characteristics on a computer and “printing” them off.  The cell’s common characteristics are being shared like chunks of code and are essentially freely available.  You can dream something up that has never existed before in nature and then just make it.  Talk about your God complex.  Stuff like this is already happening, with vats of cells engineered to make a synthetic fiber which is made into fabrics at DuPont. 

Naturally there is some concern about what kind of things could be made to, oh you know, kill everyone.  Of course these concerns are quite valid, but really it probably all boils down to the same risk as nuclear weapons.  The basic theory is common knowledge, everybody can find out how to make them.  The actual making of them is still pretty darn hard, but it can be done.  The real problem is making them without anyone else knowing you are making them, and that has so far proven to be impossible.  The tools and materials are just too rare and scarce.  Time will tell how long it takes before making really bad viruses or bacteria becomes easy enough to become a serious threat.  Like when you can just Napster yourself a good solid flu virus on a Thursday night to call in sick on Friday.  Then that’s a problem.  Oh wait, I guess it would be better if you weren’t actually sick, but just pretended to be sick….

In the meantime we will probably see some bio-tech companies start to expand to Googlific heights.  If I had any money, maybe that would be a good bet.  Since I’m a capitalist, I will think of a way to make money from this before we all die.

Have a read for yourself.

Save the Music Industry

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Canoe.ca is running a bit of a series of articles on the music industry, downloading, sales, torrents, and the whole ball of wax.  I’ve been following it for a few days in the Ottawa Sun and online, it’s not a bad series generally.  Most of the ideas aren’t new, or even novel, but it does seem to be taking absolutely forever for the industry to figure things out.  One particularly good article that summarizes things pretty well is here.

It covers the basics: compete with free or lose everything, our loyalty doesn’t come free or cheap, piracy will always exist if you don’t give us what we want and how we want it, and my favourite: stop making sucky music.

Anyway, have a read, it’s pretty good stuff.

Finally, solar power you can actually use.

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A company seems to have finally cracked the solar cell production problem.  Solar cells have always been way too expensive to make, and so don’t usually work economically as green power sources, even though there’s nothing as plentiful as solar energy.  It’s sort of a bummer.  Anyway, it seems that someone has figured out a way to make a really disruptive product, or so it seems to me.  Basically an incredibly thin, flexible solar cell, it can be rolled up, or essentially printed right onto surfaces at very low cost.  It’s as efficient as regular solar cells (which I gather isn’t very efficient at all, but probably good enough for now) but it’s one-tenth of the cost to produce.  Now we’re talking.  I want my roof covered with this stuff, right now.  I want my car painted with it.  What the heck, I want my balding skull covered with it so my cell phone never needs to be plugged in.  Don’t pester me with “the facts” and questions about how my photovoltaic skull would power my cell phone, I’m all fired up with this right now.  Think about it, every roof top covered with solar cells because they are cheap enough to make it happen.  Every house is a power plant.  That’s a pretty cool thing, if you ask me.  The best part might be since they are so thin, they should really take the ugly out of the equation.

I saw this on Boing Boing Gadgets

EatMeCrunchy

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In a display of Internet coincidence that is probably familiar to anyone who spends any amount of time online, Nikki and I were recently discussing her extraordinarily strong aversion to soggy cereal. It’s something we have talked about before (as any married couple can attest to, you usually end up talking about weird stuff like this at some point), but she recently wished aloud that somebody could figure out how to keep her cereal dry while delivering just the right amount of milk at the right time. I’m not afflicted with this syndrome myself, but I can allow that it’s probably a big deal for some.

Anyway, here’s the coincidence part. Boing Boing provided a timely link to a device that will probably change a lot of people’s lives for the better. It’s the aptly named EatMeCrunchy cereal bowl, which features a sort of a cereal shelf to keep it high and dry while you eat from the cereal that’s mixed just in time with milk. Here’s a cross-section image I stole without permission from their website.

EatMeCrunchy bowl

Brilliant.

Better yet, the whole thing comes apart and you just throw it in the dishwasher. Doubly brilliant.

Have a look for yourself.