December 2008
30 posts
Portuguese Man O' War Isn't a Jellyfish?!
Ya learn something new everyday… and I now know what Siphonophores are. And a Portuguese Man O’ War is an example of one. (via Mefi) A colony of smaller organisms that collectively act like a larger organism — pretty neat. Makes me wonder how evolution might be different if more organisms were like siphonophores.
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There's A Winner Every Time?
The WSJ has an (old but) interesting article on carnival games and how the games are adapting to become more attractive. Newer games are designed to get players to compete against other players — as opposed to the old games that tested a player’s individual skill and seemed to be rigged to make it impossible to win no matter how skilled a person was at the game. This story gets me...
They Call It Progress! And They Mean It.
I haven’t used the newest version of Microsoft word yet… but I hear it takes some getting used to. None of the toolbars are the same, and some users are understandably upset. But Microsoft has this video explanation for why they made the changes they did. A complete overhaul of the user interface was intended to make it easier for users to accomplish what they wanted to do with...
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Data Is Coming! Data Is Coming!
I dunno how this company acquires all the data it does, but it’s really cool that it can. ImportGenius tracks all kinds of shipments into the US, and people can subscribe to the data for a variety of reasons. I wonder how much information they’ve accumulated so far? Can their data be used to predict GDP growth rates?
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Cloud Storage Is Getting Popular With The Kids
It looks like online storage services such as DropBox and Mozy are getting more attention. Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought I used DropBox back when it was a service that let you email large files… Anyway, these cloud storage services are really cool, but how are they going to make money? I guess subscription fees to store a lot of stuff reliably will work, and more and more people...
More Examples of Profitable Celebrity Items
While Angelina Jolie might have mastered the market for selling photos of her family, it looks like Scarlett Johansson’s snot-filled tissue is up for auction. Seriously, it looks like there may be people willing to pay money to own Johansson’s dried-up bodily fluids. Totally gross!
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Battery Replacement For Sonicare Toothbrushes
My Sonicare toothbrush seems to be on the last legs of its battery… so I figured someone must have figured out how to replace the battery in these devices, and the internet doesn’t fail to provide answers: the Fatwallet forum links to several instructions for the procedure.
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Neat RSS Tool -- OPMLBuilder
This is a pretty useful web tool — OPMLBuilder takes a list of RSS URLs and creates an OPML file for you.
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December Is A Time For Predictions
Looks like more predictions of the future are being thrown about. A mid-year list was started by Kevin Kelly (and Brian Eno, actually in the Summer of 1993) on “unthinkable futures” that aimed to show how unpredictable the future was. This game of trying to guess the most outrageous outcomes seems to be catching on in different ways, with Clay Shirky asking about surprising...
ZIRP! I think I'm turning Japanese... I really...
The Fed is going to cut the overnight federal funds rate to near zero — just like Japan tried to do in 2001. Let’s hope this move doesn’t mean we’re in for a decade long recession. This recession seems to be unique in many ways, and there seems to be a lot of pessimism about the future of the economy. There is another shoe left to drop in the housing market as the...
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Add to the todo list
I like sites like this that collect useful data for everyone (in this case, high yielding checking account deals). But I think it’d be so much more useful if useful data were put in an open database. Some obvious ideas: mortgage rate deals, housing asking prices, etc etc…
Principles, Laws and Effects...
I always seem to forget the name of the Hawthorne Effect — which describes how you can’t measure/monitor a subject of a study if he/she/they know you’re watching them. The name comes from the Hawthorne Works factory where workers were monitored to see if their productivity improved when various factors were changed. The lighting in the factory was made brighter, and productivity...
iPod Touch As A Phone
I don’t have an iPod Touch, but I figured it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to put VoIP on it via WiFi. Seems like there are a couple options: Fring and Truphone. But what kind of headsets work with the iPod Touch…?
Air Pressure Changes in Airplane Cabins
Whenever I travel, I have the hardest time getting my ears to pop when I want them to. The discomfort isn’t too bad, but all the babies on the plane don’t seem to enjoy the non-ear-popping experience too much either…. So I was wondering what the actual pressure difference (or rate of change) was that causes ear-popping sensations. At sea level, the air pressure is about 14.7...
NASA Spinoffs
I didn’t know NASA published spinoff technologies that originated from the space agency. I wonder how many inventions the US government licenses — and under what kind of terms? I guess one could also argue for NASA technologies to be placed in the public domain.
How (Not) To Price A New Market
The iPhone App Store is a fascinating example of a new marketplace and the dynamics of how new marketplaces grow. There are questions about how much control Apple should maintain over the developers. Should they prohibit apps like “I am Rich”? Should they try to increase the prices of the apps to encourage better apps? I’m sure this marketplace will be be widely reviewed in...
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Attack Of The WatchThatPage Clones
Just came across Versionista — which seems like another page-tracker like WatchThatPage and other similar web services. I’m hoping more web tools like Zoetrope become more open and popular, though….
Artificial Life
Synthetic life forms are really interesting, and it looks like more researchers are looking into alternative forms of biochemistry. Instead of RNA or DNA, there might be other kinds of polymer chains that could become the foundations of life or biochemical reactions. I’ve been wondering if there are other pathways to synthetic life… starting with existing lving cells — can...
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Public Datasets Rock!
Amazon has launched its public datasets service to host lots of data and encourage sharing of that data. There are several other open data networks and datawells to mine out there: Freebase, Numbrary, InfoChimps, etc, etc… When these projects combine with web app services like dabbledb.com and Trendalyzer it will be very interesting for anyone who wants to play with statistics and...
Chinese Art Isn't Art Sometimes
The German scientific journal, MaxPlanckForschung, seems to have made a tiny mistake on its cover — by publishing an ad for a Chinese brothel (instead of a nice-looking Chinese poem). Basically, the editors wanted to have pretty Chinese writing on the cover of its special edition focused on China, but they apparently didn’t translate the Chinese writing before they published it. ...
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To Do List
Someday I’ll have to play with Wikia’s non-Wikipedia sites and request my own wiki.
Everyone's Working On Social Web Apps
It looks like Wikia is adding social tools to its wiki platform. The problem seems like there are too many logins and platforms for social web tools now. There’s Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, MySpace’s thing, LinkedIn, etc, etc…. all competing for the same users with different platforms and technological barriers. I wonder when an OpenID-like system will just...
Engineering Biofuels
Instead of working on ethanol, other longer chain alcohols are getting some attention for possibly being better fuels. But the fallling price of oil seems to be threatening energy-focused startups. I like the idea of biofuels, but it seems like a pharmaceutical company might be more adept at scaling up these kinds of bioreactor-based approaches. Perhaps tabacco companies should be looking at...
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Neat Web Tool -- Zoetrope
I’ve always wanted a web tool like this: Zoetrope — which basically captures changes to web pages so that users can look back to previous versions of a web page and track changes. When I first heard about the Internet Archive, I thought it would be really cool if the Internet was stored in a distributed way on volunteers’ home computers — so instead of donating idle...
A "Taller" Gene For Humans
I randomly came across information on the HMGA2 gene — a gene that has been associated with height in humans. I’m not exactly sure how scientists have determined that this gene is partly responsible for height, but a study of 5,000 white European patients suggested that persons with two “tall” HMGA2 genes (one from each parent) correlated to taller patients. Further study...
Caffeinated Drinks...
I guess I’m not the only one who wonders how much caffeine a can of Coke has. Caffeine content data for 131 commercial drinks are published in the Journal of Food Science. I quickly jotted down a few of the most interesting data points in this openly-editable Google spreadsheet. Feel free to add more to it… According to the American Beverage Association, coffee has way more caffeine...
Medical Oddities
Apparently, a Japanese man demonstrated that human hibernation is possible when he accidently tripped and lost consciousness while climbing Mount Rokko. In 2006, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi survived for 24 days without food or water in the cold weather, presumably in an actual state of suspended animation. If only doctors could figure out how it happened, sick people could survive in hibernation until...
Why Does OXO Need To License Designs?
I guess I need to brush up on IP law regarding design patents. I saw this interesting video of a talk by Alex Lee, the president of OXO. He talks about 3 OXO tools — a mango peeler (which just looks like a big apple corer), a salad spinner and a measuring cup. The interesting part to me is that Mr. Lee implies that OXO has a “standard contract” for buying/licensing kitchenware...
Change.gov uses CC now...
Looks like Change.gov has switched to a Creative Commons license — which I thought was weird cuz I was under the impression that all government websites had to be public domain. Guess not.