May 2009
10 posts
3 tags
Smarter Than The Average Bear
Nature just posted an interesting article about yet another animal that can use tools. I’ve always wondered if really smart parrots could be trained to do useful tasks on “mechanical turk” or for jobs that are too hard for current AI and robots to handle. Breeding smarter parrots could be a “faster” route to developing other intelligent beings…. I, for one,...
2 tags
Journalism For Hire -- Everyone Is A Politician...
There seem to be a bunch of “journalism for hire” projects starting up to rescue newspapers and journalists. There’s GlobalFM.com, and the efforts at firedoglake.com. And in general, there seem to be more crowdsourced funding efforts to try to create stuff… I’m interested in this sort of thing because it sorta fits with my idea of “work mobs” replacing...
2 tags
why do people still use evite?
evite is so 1998… I’ve been wondering what other evite-clones are out there.. and I randomly saw a couple: pingg.com and anyvite.com. I haven’t tried either one yet.. but next time I organize a get-together I’ll have to see if these web services are any better (or worse). Oh yah, there’s also Renkoo…
3 tags
Anothe Random Idea: TelePilots for USPS/FedEx/Etc
I’m wondering when parcel services (eg. USPS/UPS/FedEx/etc) will use remote pilots to fly the planes that ship their packages. Will USPS be able to use the Predator-drone technology to make shipping parcels more efficient? Pilots would “telecommute” to robot planes filled with packages just like US military pilots fly Predator drones in Iraq. At some point, the parcel shipping...
1 tag
Fotomoto - Sell your photos on your own website:... →
curtian4:
Online service that helps photographers sell photos.
kinda neat…
3 tags
Where Can I Get A Cloud-Browser?
If Microsoft still wants to keep up in the browser development game, here’s an idea for them: create a “browser in the cloud” that never crashes a local machine. So a PC user could use any simple browser to log into a browsing server running a cloud-browser. This cloud-browser would save its state periodically, so that even if it crashed, the user could recover a previous state...
2 tags
Another Random Invention: Kite-Assist Blimp
I like kites. But sometimes the it’s not windy enough to fly a kite — so for the really desperate, how about a blimp or mini-helicopter to assist the kite to get up in the air. The kite would be tethered to both the operator as well as an assistive blimp/copter that would help raise the kite’s altitude. This could also be kind of an interesting tool for kite-surfing or those...
HPLC at wineries?
Randomly thinking that wineries must use HPLC for quality control… and I’m wondering if blended wines (intended to match a “fine vintage”) will ever become popular (assuming they can be “indistinguishable” from the non-blended expensive wines)… It must be possible to re-create expensive wine flavors by blending various wine batches. hmmm.
7 tags
Calling Virologists... Got Some Answers?
Viruses can have genomes made of DNA or RNA, but are there viruses that have both DNA and RNA in their genome? It is even possible? Could a man-made virus have a genome that used both RNA and DNA? I’ll leave it to other scientists to discover this DNA/RNA “Chimera Virus”…. :P