Ginormous digital art

Bert Monroy has been working with digital pictures since MacPaint. His latest creation is a monster, a Chicago scene unveiled at Photoshop World in Miami on March 22, 2006. It is a panorama of the Damen Station on the Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority. Adobe Illustrator was used for generating the majority of the basic shapes as well as all the buildings in the Chicago skyline. The rest was created in Adobe Photoshop.

• The finished image size is 40 inches by 120 inches.
• The flattened file weighs in at 1.7 Gigabytes.
• It took eleven months (close to 2,000 hours) to create.
• The painting is comprised of fifty Photoshop files.
• The image contains over 15,000 layers.
• Over 500 alpha channels were used.
• Over 250,000 paths were drawn.

Visit his site to have a gawp.
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Ikea gets competition

My good 'friend in the furniture industry' Andrew Smith phoned me yesterday to enthuse about a furniture store he'd just visited. Ilva have successfully traded in Denmark for over 30 years. In a 'coals to Newcastle'-style move they opened a flagship store in Sweden a couple of years ago. And now they're moving into Britain, with stores in Thurrock and Manchester open already, and others planned.

They have a high-quality PDF brochure available for downloading. However, according to Andrew, the real fun is in visiting the stores. Unlike Ikea's 'walking around a warehouse' approach, they have spent a lot of time and effort making the stores a pleasure to be in. Design and quality of the products is a few shades above Ikea as well.
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Maybe Armstrong got it right!

Wired reports: [edited]

An Australian computer programmer says he found the missing "a" from Armstrong's famous first words from the moon in 1969, when the world heard the phrase, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Some historians and critics have dogged Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct, "One small step for a man..." in the version he transmitted to NASA's Mission Control. Without the missing "a," Armstrong essentially said, "One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind."

The famous astronaut has maintained that he intended to say it properly and believes he did. Thanks to some high-tech sound-editing software, computer programmer Peter Shann Ford might have proved Armstrong right.

Ford said he downloaded the audio recording of Armstrong's words from a NASA website and analyzed the statement with software that allows disabled people to communicate through computers using their nerve impulses.

In a graphical representation of the famous phrase, Ford said he found evidence that the missing "a" was spoken and transmitted to NASA.

"I have reviewed the data and Peter Ford's analysis of it, and I find the technology interesting and useful," Armstrong said in a statement. "I also find his conclusion persuasive. Persuasive is the appropriate word."
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Sony's new e-book

Wired have a very good article on Sony's recently released e-book. [edited]

At 7 inches by 5 inches and with a 6-inch diagonal screen, the Sony Reader approximates paperback size, though at only 0.5 inches high it's skinnier than most. Visually, the reading experience is uncannily like that of its paper counterpart: The Reader's 800-by-600 resolution is typographically crisp at any normal (and even abnormal) reading angle, and eminently readable in the sharpest sunlight.

This revelation is due to E Ink technology: Positively or negatively charged microcapsules display black or white on the screen, which holds that charge - and the screen's image - until another page's charge replaces it. The upshot of that is that you experience a static, non-flickering screen - albeit a grayscale one - with the added benefit of very low power consumption.

A soft press of your thumb jumps you to the next page, albeit with a slightly discomfiting blackout of the entire screen while its microcapsules are at work. This electronic recasting makes you realize, however briefly, that you're holding an electronic book. But spending an hour or more with the Reader trained my brain to ignore the page twitch.

The Reader's onboard flash memory will hold approximately 80 books; if you tried to tote Austen's mere six novels about, you might look as comically clumsy as one of her countryside characters.

I sprinted through Austen's breezy excerpt, and moved on to some of the other book samples. I read 50 pages of Vanguard, a Star Trek novel, in my backyard in bright sunlight, finding no technological barrier to my enjoyment of Capt. Kirk's blusterings. I checked out The Da Vinci Code in the low light of my garage and, once I had adjusted the text size to 200 percent magnification, had no trouble swallowing Dan Brown's febrile prose. I skimmed through a few business titles - Freakonomics, Jack Welch's Winning - lying down in bed, and found page-flipping no more (or less) sleep-inducing with the Reader than with any paper business book.

Even some "manga lite," Peach Fuzz, was fun to read on the device. Though the Reader displays only four levels of gray, graphic novels and other graphically complex images appear crisply on screen, though there is a slightly longer delay for the device to paint the display.

I put a 512-MB SD card in the Reader's media slot, and it was fairly prompt in displaying a list (with thumbnails) of the 40-plus pictures on the card, and in then displaying the selected 2- to 3-MB images in sharp grayscale clarity. The Reader's interface, with its five-way main control (a four-way Menu ring and an Enter button), 10 buttons for accessing list selections, and two sets of page-turning buttons, works adequately with the device's software for basic file navigation and selection. With a button press, you can easily rotate the screen horizontally for a different point of view.

The Reader also plays MP3 files. They can be listened to through a headset (not provided with the device). I listened to a couple of sample MP3s through my Logitech headset, and the sound was clean, and cleaner yet when I hooked it up to an inexpensive, three-way Altec Lansing computer-speaker system. Though it might be an example of "feature creep" in a product Sony has positioned to be a consumer reading device, it was nice to be able to listen to some soft background music while reading a book, though the bare-bones audio interface is no iTunes.

Since Sony wants you to use its Connect software to go to the company's online store to buy from among its (at press time) 10,000 proprietary-format book titles, it almost seems a given that you'd use Sony's software of the same name to buy from its Connect music store. Not so - the Reader's Connect software, for now at least, is a different client than the music store's, and thus not interoperable. You could also entertain the notion of listening to an audio book while reading another, just to make your brain flip somersaults.

So what's not to like? Well, this isn't a book you'll blithely toss on the couch or the floor at chapter's end. At $350, it's not cheap, particularly when some used tablet PCs or discount laptops - which provide much more functionality than the Reader - could come in around that figure. It also has no color, which the manga and the digital photos seem to cry out for. There's no way to input or search data, so it's not going to have any multifunction uses like some PDAs. (There is bookmarking and a History utility to cover some of those functions.) There's no wireless access, so it must be tethered to a computer for file management. There's no backlighting, so real in-the-dark reading isn't possible. No display of video. No touch screen. And I miss the sound of a page turning.

I gave three of my colleagues a sort of Malcolm Gladwell Blink test by handing them the Reader and asking for their instant impression. Two out of three ooohed and aahhhed, and the other was immediately turned off, saying, "I'd never want to read a book on one of those things." My own feelings are an amalgam of theirs: Having used the device for many hours, I found it to be a comfortable, pleasing way to read, after initial hesitance. And it's a sharp-looking, techno-wow device with a durable feel. Its size, its screen, its general "thingness" were all appealing. But I love the feel, heft and smell of books, the tangible touch of the page, seeing their spines on the shelves.

The Reader's sleek form factor and outstanding screen give the book a run for its money. But money is a tangible factor here: I would buy a Reader, and use it with pleasure, but only if I was feeling particularly flush, if a bonus fell into my lap. I have to return this one, and I'll miss it, but I'll go back to a damn-good established interface - a traditional book - and not really feel that I've lost anything. That said, I'm easily convinced the Reader could provide a modern complement to the pleasures of paper-based reading.
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Scientists prove that tarantulas imitated Spiderman

New Scientist reports:

They have a deadly bite, but a soft footfall. Tarantulas, it turns out, can spin silk with their feet.

To crawl vertically and cling upside down, most spiders use minute claws and pads on their feet or "tarsi". These work on rough surfaces, but may fail on smooth or dirty ones. While this is not a problem for small spiders that can survive long falls, for a heavy tarantula a slip could be fatal.

To figure out how tarantulas make their way safely up vertical surfaces, Adam Summers of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues analysed the footprints of Costa Rican zebra tarantulas (Aphonopelma seemanni) as they climbed a glass wall. This revealed that the spiders left fragments of sticky silk a few micrometres in diameter and up to 2.5 centimetres long.

On looking closely at the spiders' feet the researchers found microscopic spigots that resembled the creatures' abdominal silk-producing spinnerets. "With all the work that's been done on spider feet it's amazing to find something like this. Somehow it has been missed before," says Summers.

The discovery of these structures raises an interesting evolutionary question, as abdominal spinnerets are widely considered to be the remnants of ancient appendages. "It is thought that abdominal spinnerets could be vestigial legs," says Todd Blackledge, who works on spider silk at the University of Akron in Ohio. The spinnerets have jointed segments and have been shown to move in sync with the legs when spiders walk.

So far Summers and colleagues have found foot spigots only in tarantulas, so it is possible that they are a relatively recent adaptation to supplement the claws and pads. Identifying the genes involved in tarsal silk production will help determine whether they evolved to increase traction, or if they were co-opted from an organ with some other function. Testing these hypotheses will require detailed surveys of all spider species, says Summers, looking for any that might also have silken toes.
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Kittens anyone can cuddle

CNN reports: [edited]

A California biotechnology company has started taking orders for a hypoallergenic cat for pet lovers prone to allergies. The genetically engineered feline, which is expected to be available from 2007, is the first in a planned series of lifestyle pets, Los Angeles-based Allerca said in a press release.

Allerca hopes to attract customers among the millions of people worldwide who suffer from cat allergies. Many cat lovers ignore medical advice and discomfort and choose to keep the animals as pets, or use expensive medications to cope with their allergies.

Cat allergen is also one of the main causes of childhood allergies, asthma and other respiratory diseases such as bronchitis. Cat allergies are caused by a potent protein secreted by the cat's skin and salivary glands. The allergen is so small it can remain airborne for months.

Using "gene silencing" technology, Allerca is able to suppress the production of the protein. The first breed of hypoallergenic cats will be British Shorthairs, which are considered to be ideal pets with friendly, playful and affectionate personalities.

Allerca expects the first kittens to be born in early 2007 and is already accepting $250 deposits from interested customers. Allerca president Simon Brodie told The Associated Press that he ultimately hopes to sell 200,000 of the cats annually at $3,500 each in the United States. Brodie said the cats would be spayed and neutered to prevent breeding with naturally born animals.
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Bingo watch

From TokyoFlash.com:

Continuing the Handless Timewear project, EleeNo presents "Bingo"

Despite the association with a questionably cool pass time [sic], the time itself is definitely right on the ball. The all black face layout looks far better than your regular Bingo card.

If you're a Bingo player you can be the talk of the hall with this watch, otherwise you can appreciate the great design & forget about Bingo altogether.

Telling the time is deceptively simple. The outer dots are numbered 1-12 for the hours and the inner dots for minutes - there's a small red marker on the inner track which points to the minutes in a traditional manner.

Adjusting the strap to fit can be done at home by moving the pin along to your size & then just trimming off any excess from the polyurethane strap with scissors.
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USB batteries

Fresh from the 'What-A-Good-Idea' department comes the USBCELL. This 1300mAH rechargeable battery has a hinged cap that folds back to reveal a USB connector. This can then be plugged-in to any full-size, powered USB port, avoiding the need for separate recharging devices, cradles or cables.

At 1300mAH, the USBCELL is half the capacity of many conventional rechargeable batteries. However the convenience of being able to recharge or top-up by simply plugging into a USB port is a definite plus.

AAA and 9 volt batteries are being planned, along with power-supplies for a wide range of portable devices including mobile phones and game consoles.
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You want pixels?

Seitz are a Swiss manufacturer with a 50-year history of making high-end specialist photographic equipment, including panorama cameras, enlargers, circular scan cameras, projectors, medium format cameras and livecams for the internet.

The latest addition to their catalogue is a doozy! While it's not going to trouble Canon's market share, the Seitz 6x17 Digital provides anyone who has enough money (and muscle!) with the ability to record 48-bit wide-screen images containing 160 million pixels (21,250 x 7,500).

The 6x17's CCD's data transfer rate is extremely fast, offloading its 160 million pixels at 300 MB per second - 100-times faster than any existing scan back. And if the 640 x 480 pixel preview screen isn't big enough for you, the camera can be plugged directly into a firewire-equipped computer, allowing live-viewing of the pictures taken.

The exposure speed can be dialled down to a very, very rapid 1/20,000 of a second and its light sensitivity is also extraordinary, with an ISO/ASA range (equivalent) of 500 to 10,000!

All for a mere 30,000 Euros. Now, if they could just make it a BIT smaller.
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Scientists confirm my mum knows everything, again!

My mum is always right. I know this because she tells me it is so. And unlike the Pope, my mum's infallibility is not limited to when she is speaking 'ex cathedra'. In fact, it's not even limited to when she is speaking. For this reason, my mum has very little need for 'experts' and 'scientists'.

However, scientists and experts do serve one useful function, 'proving' things that my mum has known all along.

For example, my mum knows that if you live in an environment that is too clean you will lose your resistance to, well, just about everything (the fact that my mum loves animals and hates dusting is a mere coincidence).

And, sure enough, the latest edition of New Scientist reports:

Pets can protect their young owners against common stomach bugs, according to new research.

Jane Heyworth and colleagues at the University of Western Australia found that incidences of gastroenteritis – commonly called stomach flu – were significantly lower in young children living in homes with pets, than those living without.

For six weeks, the team closely observed 965 children aged four to six, noting incidences of nausea, diarrhoea, and vomiting. Children that had a cat or dog in their household were 30% less likely to have gastroenteritis symptoms than children who lived in homes without pets.

“It is a commonly held view that dogs and cats are a source of gastroenteritis, but our results do not support that,” Heyworth says. Being licked and touched by pets may allow children to develop immunity from repeated low level exposure of pathogenic organisms, she suggests.

Previous studies have shown that people who keep pets suffer fewer health problems, such as heart disease and depression.
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Is analogue more precious than digital?

On arriving home last Friday I sifted through the usual pile of junk mail lying in my front hall. Amongst the usual detritus of pizza and digital TV ads was a quaint relic from a forgotten age. A postcard, sent to me by my good friends the Smiths while on holiday in Greece.

It is now resting on my studio's DAB radio, a small but significant symbol of communication and shared friendship. At some point it will be consigned to a wastebasket, but not before it has been frequently glanced at and the hand-written message has been re-read a number of times.

It made me think of a recent conversation with Rory. He's in the midst of preparing to move from a full-sized house to a very desirable but more modestly-sized flat, and is rationalising his accumulated belongings in anticipation. When we last chatted, he was agonising over where to store his family photographs, generations of memories stuffed in shoe-boxes and folders.

Of course, he could scan them onto a computer hard-drive. The majority of my photo-collection is stored this way. But it occurred to me that there is a special pleasure that comes from viewing a conventional photo-album or discovering and sorting through a box of prints.

Is this a generational thing? Will my children find the same joy in searching through their image collections stored on flash-drives and remote servers? Or is this love of 'real' things an intrinsic part of our species' psychosomatic make-up?
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Suburban Home Records Sampler

Suburban Home Records are hosting a sampler download of the artists they promote.

The styles range from Springsteen-esque rock to 'shouty-shouty, growly-growly, thrashy-thrashy'. I've kept a few of the tracks. My favourites include 'Me and Joe Went Out to California...' from Drag The River (Buffalo Tom meets early John Mellencamp), 'Idle Idylist' by Tim Barry (could be a Slobberbone tribute band!) and 'All Is Forgotten' by Dead Girls Ruin Everything (which also gets my coveted 'Best Band Name of the Month' award).

For the sensitive souls or those of you with young-uns, a few of the tracks contain bad-language.

You can download the songs track-by-track, or grab a zip file containing all of them.

If you decide to keep any of the tracks, and want an image for your iTunes artwork click here.
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Furthest rock from the Sun gets a name

The Register reports: [edited]

The distant rock which prompted astronomers to strip Pluto of its planethood has been offically named Eris, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced Wednesday.

Eris is the Greek goddess of discord, hinting at the troubled ordination of the newly-discovered body. One of Eris' discoverers, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, told AP the new name was "too perfect to resist."

Eris' moon gets the monicker Dysnomia, after Eris' daughter - the spirit of lawlessness - in Greek mythology.

On its discovery last year Eris was provisionally dubbed Xena, after the cult-TV warrior princess. This was followed by news it is actually bigger than Pluto, which had enjoyed planet status since its own discovery by Clyde W. Tombaugh in 1930.

A recent meeting of the IAU in Prague decided Pluto can no longer be deemed a full planet. Together with Eris it will now bear the new term "dwarf planet". Ceres, an asteroid-like body between Mars and Jupiter joins Eris and Pluto as a dwarf planet.

As the farthest known object from the Sun in our Solar System, Eris orbits once every 560 Earth years, and has a surface temperature of -250°C.

------------

The loveliest iPod yet

If you've been living in a (broadband-less) cave for the past couple of days you may not have heard that Apple has released a slew of iPod updates (along with a new version of iTunes).

All three designs are attractive, but by far the most gorgeous is the completely redesigned iPod Shuffle. Clad in brushed aluminium this triumph of miniaturisation weighs in at just over half-an-ounce. Its dimensions are about as small as you can get while retaining a play button and a headphone socket! It has plenty of room (and battery) to play over 10 hours of music, and the £55 price tag includes an elegant docking station.

It is a superb example of what Apple does so well. I'm still trying to think of a good reason for getting one!
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World of Warcraft, more than just a game?

Newsweek reports: [edited]

Two years into the history of World of Warcraft — an online game that accommodates 7 million players around the world — no one had successfully ventured into the dungeon to slay a group of computer-generated villains known as the Four Horsemen. But four experienced "guilds" of players — one in Europe, two in America and one in China — were coming close, posting updates on separate Web sites they maintained. Finally, a 40-person contingent from a U.S. guild conquered the last beast — and its members became instant international celebrities in a massive community where dragons and Druids are as real as dirt.

In the physical world we vainly scrounge for glory. Bin Laden still taunts us, the bus doors close before we reach them and leave us standing in the rain. But in the fantasy realm of Azeroth, the virtual geography of World of Warcraft, the physical pain comes only from hitting a keyboard too hard, camaraderie is the norm and heroism is never far away. In simple terms, Warcraft is the most advanced and popular entry in a genre called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMO. "I call it the Technicolor, Americanized version of 'Lord of the Rings'," says Chris Metzen, VP of creative development for the game's maker, Blizzard Software. But for millions it is more than a game—it's an escape, an obsession and a home.

Engaging in this orgy of sword-swiping, spell-casting and monster-slaying generally involves a $50 purchase of the software and a monthly $15 fee thereafter to play online. Players in Asia—a clear majority of the WOW population, despite the fact that the game was created by digital dudes in Irvine, Calif. — buy cards that allow them WOW time for a few cents an hour. Then there's the merchandising: T shirts, jackets, hats, a nondigital (!) board game. In China, 600 million Coke cans were festooned with WOW figures. There are seven novels based on Warcraft lore. And Blizzard recently inked a movie deal with the studio that produced "Superman Returns." Games-industry analyst David Cole estimates that Blizzard (part of Vivendi) has made more than $300 million from the game so far. Blizzard COO Paul Sams says only, "We are an incredibly profitable company."

What distinguishes Warcraft from previous blockbuster games is its immersive nature and compellingocial dynamics. It's a rich, persistent alternative world, a medieval Matrix with lush graphics and even a seductive soundtrack (Blizzard has two full-time in-house composers). Blizzard improved on previous MMOs like Sony's Everquest by cleverly crafting its game so that newbies could build up characters at their own pace, shielded from predators who would casually "gank" them — while experienced players continually face more and more daunting challenges. The company mantra, says lead designer Rob Pardo, is "easy to learn, difficult to master." After months of play, when you reach the ultimate level (60), you join with other players for intricately planned raids on dungeons, or engage in massive rumbles against other guilds.

"Ninety percent of what I do is never finished — parenting, teaching, doing the laundry," says Elizabeth Lawley (Level 60, Troll Priest), a Rochester, N.Y., college professor. "In WOW, I can cross things off a list — I've finished a quest, I've reached a new level."
------------

Slimming your URLs

URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are the addresses that link our browsers to specific web pages on sites all over the world. When I want to send someone a link to a particular web page, I copy and paste the URL into an email/IM window, allowing them to visit the site with the click of a mouse.

However, if the URL is too long, many programs break the URL, making it 'un-clickable'.

tinyurl.com transforms an unwieldy url into a neat and manageable link. There is no magic involved, the tinyurl link simply relays you to the site via the original link stored on their web site.

So:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP

becomes:

http://tinyurl.com/6

This can also be useful if you are putting links into a document, avoiding cumbersome strings of alphanumerics spoiling your elegant typography!

Conrad pointed me to url(x). This works in a similar way, but keeps identifying text in the URL.

So:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP

becomes:

http://urlx.org/mapquest.com/45cb

This is particularly useful when you search for the URL at a later date.

The potential downside to these URLs is that they rely on the referring sites being live. If the relay server goes down, your links die with it.
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Slimier snails slither slower

New Scientist reports:

If you are into betting on snail races, here's a tip: put your money on the least slimy snail. Making mucus requires energy, and it turns out that snails slither best when they produce as little as possible of just the right kind of goo.

Snails, slugs and other gastropods move by using their muscles to generate travelling waves of stress in the thin layers of mucus they lay down. Because it takes more energy to produce the mucus than to power their muscles, they need to get by with the thinnest layer possible.

The key to their success seems to be an unusual physical property of the mucus. When Eric Lauga and Annette Hosoi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology modelled the locomotion of gastropods mathematically, they found that the creatures exploit a phenomenon called "shear-thinning" - a fall in the viscosity of the mucus when it is between two surfaces that are moving relative to one another.

"Shear-thinning allows the gastropod to crawl while using the least amount of fluid," Lauga says.

The viscosity of most liquids does not change under such conditions, and some become more viscous between moving surfaces. The viscosity of snail and slug mucus, by contrast, drops by a factor of more than 1000 under biologically realistic conditions.
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Free textures

TextureKing.com 'is a project by REH3design. Throughout this site you will find a growing repository of high quality stock photos that are free for professional and personal use.

'We hope that you put find them useful and enjoy the site as much as we've had building it.'

Couldn't have put it (much) better myself.
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Robot wine tasters

Santa Fe New Mexican reports: [edited]

The ability to discern good wine from bad, name the specific brand from a tiny sip and recommend a complementary cheese would seem to be about as human a skill as there is. In Japan, robots are doing it.

Researchers at NEC System Technologies and Mie University have designed an electromechanical sommelier able to identify dozens of different wines, cheeses and hors d'oeuvres.

"There are all kinds of robots out there doing many different things," said Hideo Shimazu, director of the NEC System Technology Research Laboratory and a joint-leader of the robot project. "But we decided to focus on wine because that seemed like a real challenge."

Last month, they unveiled the fruits of their two-year effort - a green-and-white prototype with eyes, a head that swivels and a mouth that lights up whenever the robot talks.

At the end of the robot's left arm is an infrared spectrometer. When objects are placed up against the sensor, the robot fires off a beam of infrared light. The reflected light is then analyzed in real time to determine the object's chemical composition.

"All foods have a unique fingerprint," Shimazu said. "The robot uses that data to identify what it is inspecting right there on the spot."

When it has identified a wine, the robot speaks up in a childlike voice. It names the brand and adds a comment or two on the taste, such as whether it is a buttery chardonnay or a full-bodied shiraz, and what kind of foods might go well on the side.

Shimazu said the robots could be "personalized," or programmed to recognize the kinds of wines its owner prefers and recommend new varieties to fit its owner's taste. Because it is analyzing the chemical composition of the wine or food placed before it, it can also alert its owner to possible health issues, gently warning against fatty or salty products.

That capability has other useful applications. Given three ripe, identical-looking apples to analyze, the robot was able without taking a bite to correctly single out one as sweet and the other two as a bit sour.

But sommeliers need not fear for their jobs just yet.

Of the thousands of wines on the market, the robot can be programmed to accurately identify only a few dozen at most. It also has more trouble with the task after the bottle has been opened and the wine begins to breathe and thus transform chemically.

Some of the mistakes it makes would get a human sommelier fired [or beaten up, ed]. When a reporter's hand was placed against the robot's taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

Mie University engineering professor Atsushi Hashimoto, the project's other co-leader, acknowledged there is much room for improvement. But he said the robot could be used in the near future at wineries to test the taste of each bottle without actually unscrewing any corks.

"It's still like a child," he said. "But not a completely ignorant one."

Industry experts note the shortcomings but agree on the robot's possibilities.

"I see the potential to analyze expensive and old wine to say whether it is authentic or not," said Philippe Bramaz of the Italian winemaker Calzaluga. "Auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's could use this technology to test wine without opening it."
------------

Miuro: your iPod, on wheels!

Fresh from the 'Who the heck would buy one of those?' department, Yahoo.com reports: [edited]

The Miuro turns an iPod music player into a dancing boombox-on-wheels. The 14-inch-wide machine from ZMP blares music as it rolls and twists from room to room.

The $930 (yes, you DID read that right, ed.) Miuro — short for "music innovation based on utility robot technology" (ouch! ed.) — responds to a handheld remote control and WiFi trasmissions from a PC to play music from iTunes and other programs.

At a demonstration in Tokyo, the 11-pound Miuro did a preprogrammed dance, rolling about and pivoting to music.

"This is a robot version of music-on-the-move that's so popular," said Miuro designer Shinichi Hara, who also creates album jackets for Japanese pop stars. "I designed it to have a gentle look because it becomes a part of everyday life by integrating robotics and music," Hara said.

The robot went on sale Thursday in Japan by Internet order, and overseas availability is expected in the second half of 2007. ZMP is hoping to sell 10,000 Miuros in the first year, targeting sales of more than $8.5 million.

ZMP President Hisashi Taniguchi said robotic technology adds another convenience to mobile music. "The robot helps you listen to music wherever you are without even thinking about it," he said. "Sometimes I don't even have the energy to put on a CD."

Separately sold options add a camera and sensors to the robot so it will map out its own position and remember routes.
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The science of tickling

The Register reports: [edited]

As every child knows, tickling is the act of touching a part of the body so as to cause involuntary laughter.

The subject of tickling has intrigued philosophers since antiquity. Even Plato and Aristotle speculated about tickling and its purpose.

'Tickle' is derived from the Old English word 'tinclian' meaning 'to touch lightly'.

Charles Darwin was the first scientist recorded as seriously analysing this most peculiar human behaviour. In 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals' (1872) Darwin described in detail the involuntary spasms tickling triggers in babies, children, adults, and non-human primates. He concluded that tickling was an ingredient in forming and keeping social bonds. Such bonding occurs through stimulating each other to laugh and feel merry. This is particularly true for parents and children.

Darwin noted that the key to success in tickling is that "the precise point to be tickled must not be known" to the person being tickled. Thus, it is surprise rather than tactile pressure that is a key ingredient in tickling.

Subsequent laboratory experiments have found that in people who are extremely suggestible, the threat of being tickled without laying a finger on them is enough to induce hysterics. This is as effective with adults as with children and provides a clue to the fact that tickling is not merely a physical sensation as Darwin theorised.

Apart from Darwin's social bond theory for the importance of tickling, there is a simpler theory. The sensation felt when being tickled is similar to the one felt when insects crawl on the body. The tickle response may be a protective warning device against the stings and bites of harmful insects.

Some facts to impress your colleagues:

— It is unknown why certain areas of the body are more ticklish than others.

— 85 per cent of adults in some way or another enjoy being tickled, tickling others, or watching others being tickled.

— Tickling was used as a torture by the ancient Romans.

— Research headed by Dr M Blagrove from the University of Wales in Swansea shows that the normal tickling response may be absent in those with schizophrenia.
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Computers take on crosswords

New Scientist reports: [edited]

A crossword-solving computer program has triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English.

The competition took place in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. WebCrow took on 25 human competitors, mostly conference attendees, while more than 50 crossword enthusiasts and AI researchers competed online.

Among the five crosswords were two American-style ones from that day’s editions of the New York Times and Washington Post. A further two, in Italian, came from national newspaper La Repubblica and a local Italian title, while a puzzle with clues in both languages was made using past clues from the same sources. Full results and the puzzles set can be seen on the WebCrow website.

One version of WebCrow competed from its 'home' in the computing department at the University of Siena, Italy, while a streamlined version installed on a smaller computer competed as well, displaying its progress on a large screen in the conference hall.

The two WebCrow versions came a close first and second overall and on the American and bi-lingual puzzles, with the streamlined version taking the honours. Marco Ernandes, who created WebCrow along with Giovanni Angelini and Marco Gori told New Scientist he was particularly pleased with WebCrow's performance on the American puzzles.

"It exceeded our expectations because there were around 15 Americans in the competition," he said. "Now we'd like to test it against more people with English as their first language.”

However, the streamlined software managed only 21st place and its cousin 25th for the Italian puzzles. "The writer of one of those puzzles is well known for having lots of puns and political clues," Ernandes explains. Such clues, and those used in cryptic crosswords, need very specific human knowledge or reasoning that are beyond WebCrow's ability, he says.

WebCrow uses four techniques in parallel to find possible answers to a clue. Two involve looking for the clue or a near match in a database of solved crosswords or using a dictionary. Another uses rules known to work on a kind of Italian clue with two letter answers and the fourth technique is to search the internet.

WebCrow performs a search using key words extracted from the clue. It can usually find the answer by looking at the small previews that appear with the search engine results, but it can scan whole pages if necessary. Words of the right length that crop up most often in the results are taken to be possible answers.

A list of possible solutions to the clue is produced by combining the suggestions generated by each technique. When possible answers have been found for each clue the software uses trial and error to find the combination of interlocking answers that best fills the grid.

Tony Veale works on software that can deal with human language at University College Dublin, Ireland, and watched WebCrow in action. He told New Scientist he was impressed. "It's part of a trend to use the web as a 'shallow' source of human knowledge for artificial intelligence," he says.

The web is 'shallow' because most content cannot be understood by a computer, Veale explains, but the links between content can be used more easily to provide some information about how things are related.

"There are applications for this kind of technology in educational products," Veale adds, the techniques being developed for WebCrow could be used to automatically generate puzzles for school materials or help children with the answers.
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Building a Menger Sponge

theifforg reports: [edited]

Menger's sponge - named for its inventor Karl Menger (1902-1985) and sometimes wrongly called Sierpinski's Sponge - is a fractal solid that can be described as follows. Take a cube, divide it into 27 (3 x 3 x 3) smaller cubes of the same size; now remove the cube in the center of each face plus the cube at the center of the whole. You are left with a structure consisting of the eight small corner cubes plus twelve small edge cubes holding them together. Now, imagine repeating this process on each of these remaining 20 cubes. Repeat again. And again, ad infinitum...

The Business Card Menger Sponge Project
The primary goal of the Business Card Menger Sponge Project was to build a depth 3 approximation to Menger’s Sponge as shown above, out of 66,048 business cards. This can be done by building 8000 business card cubes of 6 cards each, linking them together and using the additional cards to panel the 18,048 exterior faces of the sponge, giving a more pleasing finish to the final structure.

In order to build the sponge, I devised a decomposition of the overall structure into simple units that almost anyone can learn to make, which can then be assembled into the whole. The finished sponge measures slightly over 54 inches (140 cm) on each side and weighs about 150 pounds (70 kg).

My idea was that a model of a level 3 Menger Sponge would be built out of business cards one cube at a time, with many folders helping by pre-creasing the business cards. As the structure got larger there would be room for perhaps as many as 4-8 people to work on it simultaneously. They would still be the major bottle neck, since assembly and paneling alone take more than half the construction time. I calculated it would take such a group working together around 50-100 hours from start to finish, but I doubted I could find enough dedicated volunteers to do it this way...

Visit this page for more information than you will ever need about building your own Menger Sponge.

For information about the Institute for Figuring visit their about page.
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You can judge an LP by its cover

When the phenomenon that was 'punk rock' hit the UK, I was completing the latter part of my secondary education at Latymer Upper, Hammersmith. It wasn't long before my Genesis and Pink Floyd albums were being traded in for the latest releases by the Jam and the Skids.

Each Saturday morning I would make my weekly pilgrammage to Sellanbys record store and exchange my paper round money for vinyl. Usually I had a good idea what I wanted, but on two occasions I was seduced by cover artwork. Serendipitously, they are two of my favourite albums to this day.

Ultravox! (1977) was the eponymous debut of a band created by vocalist, songwriter and keyboardist John Foxx. The exclamation mark was (allegedly) an homage to the influential German band Neu!

Ultravox! (pre-Midge Ure) were inspired by and shamelessly plagiarised (early) Roxy Music, New York Dolls, Bowie and Hawkwind. Their debut album was released in February 1977. It was co-produced by Brian Eno (who next worked with Bowie on the Low album) and Steve Lillywhite (Peter Gabriel, U2, Coldplay). Sales were poor, the album and singles failed to enter the UK charts.

The lyrics are by turns extravagant, hilarious and pretentious (e.g. My sex, Waits for me, Like a mongrel waits, Downwind on a tight rope leash. My sex, Is a fragile acrobat, Sometimes I'm a novocaine shot, Sometimes I'm an automat).

My vinyl version of the album bears the scars of teenage parties and worn stylii, and I bought it on CD a few years ago. I was appalled at the sound quality, so much so that I went back to digitising the original LP to try and recover some of the original energy. The CD has recently been remastered however, and the quality is much better on this one (yes, this sucker DID buy it, AGAIN!).

The second album I bought for its cover was Wire's debut, Pink Flag (1977). It has also been recently re-mastered, and although I haven't succumbed to buying it yet, I probably will. Wire were a weird blend of art-school, and punk (they were even on the same Harvest label as Pink Floyd).

Pink Flag's 22 tracks are a frantic and ambitious mixture of styles, with some lasting less than a minute. It has proved to be a very influential recording. REM covered 'Strange' (badly) on their Document #5 LP. Elastica's 'Connection' was so close to 'Three Girl Rhumba' that it resulted in an out of court settlment, and they also performed a straight cover of '12XU'.

More recently, post-punk bands from Bloc Party to Interpol have acknowledged their debt to the album.
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Speech recognition on a chip

RegHardware reports: [edited]

Speech technology ranks right down there with flying cars, robots and Windows as the grandest of disappointments in geekdom. Thankfully, the horrid state of the technology hasn't broken the will of all researchers in the speech field. In fact, one team at Carnegie Mellon University optimistically thinks they may have solved the speech recognition conundrum with a new chip.

Armed with a $1m grant from the National Science Foundation, CMU's In Silico Vox team has set the modest goal of showing a 100 to 1,000 times improvement in the performance of speech recognition systems. Such a leap would improve the quality of speech technology to the point where it would feasible to place sophisticated speech engines in devices such as cell phones or PDAs. Rob Rutenbar, a professor at CMU, unveiled the processor that is key to the project's end goal today at the Hot Chips conference here.

"It's just a bad idea trying to push this technology in software only," Rutenbar said. "Most of the applications of tomorrow don't want 20 to 30 per cent better performance. They want factors of 100 or factors of 1,000."

Rutenbar likened the move to create a speech chip with the established practice of creating specialized processors to deal with graphics operations.

"Nobody paints pixels in software," he said. "You would have to be nuts. Videos from ESPN are not painted on your cell phone screen by software. There's a small graphics engine doing that."

Some companies have produced decent speech recognition software for large call centers and automated phone systems. These packages, however, require far more processing power than you're likely to find on smaller computing devices.

The speech systems must compare 50 main sounds used in typical conversation against thousands of permutations on these sounds made when people pronounce words in different ways. The speech engines then run through database of common two- and three-word combinations against a backdrop of some 50,000 different words to come up with strong matches for what a person is actually saying. All told, this process chews through processor, memory and energy resources. That's bad news for a cell phone designer.

The CMU team, however, has already created a lightweight hardware speech engine based on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) from Xilinx that solves many of these problems. Rutenbar showed the chip in action with it successfully converting the question, "When will Windows arrive?" into text on the screen.

Right now, the processor can only handle about 1,000 words at a modest speed. By the end of the year, CMU hopes to create a larger FPGA system capable of dealing with 5,000 words in real-time. Then, next year it will march to 10,000 and 50,000 words on the FPGA system, while exploring full-fledged silicon designs.
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More free music

mp34u.com is a site that aims to be 'A music lover's playground', offering links to a wide range of free and legal MP3s.

The site is split into a number of different sections:

Muzic - A directory of MP3s on the internet, all licensed under the creative commons agreement.

MP34U - A network of 'sources' who have scoured the web for new material.

MP3 Jackpot - MP34U's 'pick of the day'.

Within a few minutes, I discovered one of my current favourite songs 'Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above' by CSS. Result!
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Gaming goes pink

The release of a new games console in Japan is always an event. Huge, police-managed queues are not uncommon. However, when the Nintendo DS lite was released in Japan, it wasn't the length of the queues that made headlines, but their content.

For the first time in gaming history, there were FEMALES in the queues. And not just teenage manga lookalikes. The Nintendo DS's friendly interface and games like Nintendogs, Animal Crossing and Brain Age have drawn a wide range of Japan's demographic into the joys of gaming.

The pink Nintendo DS was released on July 20, and has been a tremendous success.

Never one to miss a marketing trick, Sony has responded with pink versions of their PS2:


And their PSP:


Go on, you KNOW you want one.
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'Left over right, right under left, right over...'

Ian's Shoelace Site (subtitle: 'Bringing you the fun, fashion & science of shoelaces') is one of those sites that takes a subject you thought was mundane and turns it into something that is both intriguing and fun.

I'll let Ian explain:

"Most people learn to tie their shoelaces around the age of five. It's one of those 'rites of passage', after which we take it for granted. Why then would anyone older than that visit a web site about tying shoelaces?

"Parents & teachers often visit, looking for early learning materials. Adults look for self-help, either through having never learned correctly as a child or due to increasing infirmity. Occupational therapists look for alternatives to suit different learning styles. Academics & lateral thinkers look for more efficient methods. Knot enthusiasts look for a reference. Sportspeople look for a competitive edge.

"Whatever the reason, I'm sure you'll find something useful here about tying shoelaces!"

And you will.

Thanks Brook for bringing this quirky and fascinating site to my attention.
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Colour? We don't need no steenking colour!

I can still recall the buzz I experienced the first time i got a 'hands-on' experience of a Macintosh Plus. One of the great things was that you could actually draw pictures, crisply rendered on its hi-res, 512 by 342 pixel black & white (well, eggshell blue) display.

Despite the progress made in imaging software, pixel art remains a vibrant niche art form. And for those of you lucky/ discerning/ intelligent/ stupid enough to own an Apple computer, a piece of (free) software is now available that lets you experience the joy of 1-bit, and at a superior clarity than Photoshop can achieve.

TinRocket.com reports: [edited]

HyperDither is a Mac OSX image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Specifically, HyperDither implements the Atkinson dithering filter.

Way back in the early days of Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & nature photography fame) developed a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data to the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or “Error-diffusion” filter (employed by QuickTime and PhotoShop).

The dither matrix was implemented in Apple’s HyperScan software for their original flatbed scanner. HyperScan, and hence the most-excellent Atkinson dithering routine, has been unavailable for many, many years—but not forgotten!

I was able to email Bill Atkinson in January, 2003 and inquire about the details of the algorithm; he was kind enough to respond with a brief write up of the routine - 15 minutes later I had it up and running.

It’s taken a few spare afternoons since 2003 to pack everything into a nice little application with documentation and an icon—better late than never!

To illustrate how good the program is, here's a bitmap image that has been created in Photoshop:


The same image using HyperDither:


There are more examples on the TinRocket site.
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SatNav goes pocket-sized

With a name as unwieldly as it is tiny, the Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox N100 is an attractive and reasonably priced SatNav device. Recently released in the UK, priced around £220 RegHardware have given it a very good review. [edited]

The N100 is being heralded by Fujitsu Siemens as "the smallest and lightest multifunctional PNA on the market", and with good reason. Weighing in at a mere 110g and with its svelte 89 x 62 x 16mm physique, it's smaller than many mobile phones. [On an average screen the picture below should be close to actual-size]


The silver and white design is unashamedly minimalist, and while I'll admit that Fujitsu Siemens' stock clean-lines approach doesn't always work for me, the N100 is a peach. It might be the white fascia or the total lack of any controls or flourishes on the front, but there's a certain Apple-esque quality to the N100 that can pique your interest even before you know the specifications. If you're not fond of the fascia, you can swap it for a different colour. You get a black face-plate in the box and others colours are also available.

An open slot on the left of the device takes the supplied memory card, a 1GB MiniSD job, bearing pre-installed maps of the British Isles, France and Nordic nations, and you get a further seven maps on the supplied DVD, all of which can be quickly activated online. This means you have virtually instant access to an incredible 37 European countries right out of the box.

[The] 2.8in, 240 x 320 (QVGA) TFT screen is a pleasure to use. Performance in bright sunlight was excellent, and squeezing a QVGA resolution into such a relatively small screen meant text was pin-sharp. Both brightness and contrast were extremely good and this more than compensates for its small size. All of the important route-related data is large and clear enough to be seen at a glance, and while it can be awkward to read the smaller bits of information quickly, you should pull over before you access anything other than navigation instructions.

Trying the N100 brought me my first opportunity to play with Navigons' newly released MobileNavigator 6. It has produced a very polished product. From the animated slide-out menus to the semi-transparent on-map points of interest with simulated drop-shadows it all looks very slick. Of course, all the stock options are present and correct, including off-line route planning with multiple waypoints; creation and naming of favourite destinations; and user-defined routes.

There's also quick access to user-defined points of interest from the new destinations menu, allowing you quickly to pinpoint, for example, nearby petrol stations from your current location.

One notable omission is the ability to import custom points of interest, and of course I'm thinking of speed-camera locations in particular. This is likely to be an increasingly important buying decision when comparing the N100 with units that come with speed camera data already built in.

Fujitsu Siemens' Pocket Loox N100 performed like a charm. Route selection has so far proved to be prudent and despite the occasional stutter, the software looks good and feels responsive.
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Some more (free) typefaces

misprintedtype.com has a number of free fonts available for download (PC & Mac). All of them are worth a browse, but these are my favourites:

Nail Scratch - Descriptively named. All capitals, but the 'lower case' set provides alternate shapes - useful for when you have two of the same letter in close proximity.

Diesel - Using an 'outline' design, with the outside distressed more than the inside, lends 'clarity to the disparity'.

Porcelain - Brilliantly squiggly (a typographic term) yet elegant. Word to the wise: if you want people to be able to read what you've typed, avoid 'all caps'!

Dirty Ego - An excellent 'stencil' font. All capitals, but the lower case set is 'dirtier' than the upper case.
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The next iPod shuffle?

I've not seen one in 'the flesh', but the first images of the miniscule (think 'iPod shuffle-size') music player look very nice indeed. In particular, the OLED LCD display (similar to that used by the latest Sony music players) manages to be both attractive and clear.

Reviews have been mixed so far, software is PC-only, it won't play AAC files, and the software and documentation appear to be flaky. But if Apple added this display techology to the iPod Shuffle... mmm...

Find out more on this page.
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The camera always lies

Four Tel-Aviv University graduates are working on an algorithm that enhances the 'attractiveness' of images of the human face.

Their web page doesn't give many details, but I found myself fascinated (and disturbed) at how subtle changes in facial proportions and symmetry can make the difference between 'OK' and 'attractive'.

And with manufacturers like Fujifilm developing face-recognition software for their cameras, how long until there are 'prettify' options on your digital camera?
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30,000 songs on your iPod?

PC Advisor reports: [edited]

A 1.8" 120GB hard drive [the size used in] iPods is scheduled to be released by Seagate in December this year.

Seagate CEO William Watkins spoke to BusinessWeek to describe the advantages hard drive technology holds over its flash-based alternatives. He recognises that as flash memory capacities grow, hard drive sales may see some challenges, but the technology maintains one key advantage: its lower cost per gigabyte of storage.

While he doesn't claim Seagate's new 120GB drives will ship in future iPods, he does remark: "We have this new opportunity in 1.8" drives, which is starting to grow for handheld video."
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Samsung release VGA 5cm screen

Samsung has announced the release of the industry's first 5cm LCD panel to achieve 640 x 480 pixels.

This means that camera and mobile phone-size screens will be able to display images at 12 pixels per millimetre, three times that of most LCD displays, and ten times that of many plasma screens.

I'm looking forward to the time when all digital displays are available with this (and greater) resolutions. The primary benefits will be that text can be displayed at qualites that approach those of the printed page, making type more pleasant to look at and easier to read.
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At last! A sexy electric car.

The latest issue of Wired contains an article on the Tesla Roadster. [selected excerpts follow...]

Martin Eberhard holds the brake down with his left foot and presses on the accelerator with his right. The motor revs, the car strains against the brake. I hear almost nothing. Just a quiet whine like the sound of a jet preparing for takeoff 5 miles away. We’re belted into a shimmering black sports car on a quiet, tree-lined street in San Carlos, California, 23 miles south of San Francisco. It has taken Eberhard three years to get this prototype ready for mass production, but with the backing of PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and ex-eBay chief Jeff Skoll, he has created Silicon Valley’s first real auto company.

He releases the brake and my head snaps back. One-one-thousand: I get a floating feeling, like going over the falls in a roller coaster. Two-one-thousand: The world tunnels, the trees blur. Three-one-thousand: We hit 60 miles per hour. Eberhard brakes. We’re at a standstill again – elapsed time, nine seconds. When potential buyers get a look at the vehicle this summer, it will be among the quickest production cars in the world. And, compared to other supercars like the Bugatti Veyron, Ferrari Enzo, and Lamborghini Diablo, it’s a bargain. More intriguing: It has no combustion engine.

The trick? The Tesla Roadster is powered by 6,831 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries – the same cells that run a laptop computer. Range: 250 miles. Fuel efficiency: 1 to 2 cents per mile. Top speed: more than 130 mph. The first cars will be built at a factory in England and are slated to hit the market next summer. And Tesla Motors, Eberhard’s company, is already gearing up for a four-door battery-powered sedan.


The central concept of Tesla Motors, founded in July 2003, is that there is no need to reinvent the battery, particularly for a product with a small initial market. Eberhard simply adopted the lithium-ion technology used in laptops and harnessed the momentum of the computer industry. Let Dell, HP, and the rest of the sprawling PC business, with their billions of R&D dollars, do the hard work of extending battery life and driving down prices. He’d piggyback on their innovations.

More important, Eberhard says, the electric cars of the past – slow, cramped, spartan – looked like they were designed by people who thought you shouldn’t be driving to begin with. Eberhard calls them “punishment cars.” What he wanted to build, he told his potential investors, was a classic sports car.

Eberhard owes his radically different approach to Nikola Tesla, the iconic Serbian engineer who built the first AC induction motor in the 1880s. Eberhard’s supercharged update of that motor is powered by a copper and steel rotor that is spun by a magnetic field. There are no moving parts besides the rotor. Step on the accelerator and the motor delivers instantaneously. The result: 0 to 60 in about four seconds.

The Roadster’s sporty styling allowed Eberhard to maximize the car’s range and still win a drag race. With its two-person capacity and aerodynamic contours, the lightweight machine can go 250 miles on a single charge. (When connected to a special 220-volt, 70-amp outlet, recharging takes about three and a half hours.) Plus, the sports car class lets Eberhard price it on the high end – in the range of a Porsche 911 Carrera S, roughly $80,000.

He’s already preparing a sedan, codenamed White Star, which could hit streets as early as 2008. Of course, the sedan won’t be as lightweight or aerodynamic as the Roadster, so its range is likely to drop significantly. Eberhard’s response: maybe with today’s tech. But battery power is improving steadily, and several companies say they may soon double battery life. By the time the sedan comes out, he says, batteries will be ready to deliver: “We’re going to ride that technology curve all the way home.”

[Driving the Tesla is] an eerie, disconcerting feeling. There’s no engine hum – nothing to make you think that this car should be sold with a neck brace. Most high-performance cars telegraph their power. That’s part of the allure of a seriously fast car – you can hear it coming. The Roadster seems like a sneak attack. As with everything about this car, Eberhard has a fast answer. “Some people are going to miss the sound of a roaring engine,” he says, “just like people used to miss the sound of horse hooves clippity-clopping down the street.”
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Nintendo Wii, the anticipation grows

With an expected release date of late November 2006, details of Nintendo's latest console are causing a growing wave of speculation. Much of it is in the context of how different it is from Sony's next console, the PS3, which is slated for release at a similar time.

The disparity in the length of queues to try out the Wii and PS3 at E3 2006 have become a thing of geek legend.

To view some of the reasons why I believe that the Wii is going to be a Christmas hit, visit this link for a five-minute video montage of some Nintendo ads.

The price difference (c. Wii: £150 vs PS3: £450) is also going to be a big factor when parents are considering which console to put under the Christmas tree.

And if you're willing to turn down your politically correct antennae, this perceptive and hilarious spoof of the recent Apple ads will tell you more about the differences between the consoles than any comparison charts or discussion forums will!
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iCarta - let the toilet humour commence

AtechFlash market a range of flash memory-related products. What inspired them to add this to their range is a mystery, but it did make me smile, in an incredulous "What the..?" kind of way.

iCarta (a 'Stereo Dock for iPod® with Bath Tissue Holder') will 'Enhance your Experience in any room with your favorite music from your iPod.' For those of you who are thinking 'I can only think of one room in my house where I want a 'Bath Tissue Holder', think again... the 'Integrated Bath tissue holder that can be easily folded as a stereo dock'... clever!

Features also include: '4 Integrated high performance moisture-free speakers', presumably 'moisturised' speakers will be made available as an optional extra in the future.

Oh, and before you reach for your credit card, the iCarta 'Requires AC Power (AC Adapter included)'. So, if your WC is lacking in a mains socket, you're out of luck!
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Alternative interfaces part 2

Back in February I posted links to some alternative interfaces. One of them was by Jeff Han, a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Adobe has posted a fascinating and informative video of Jeff demonstrating his latest developments. The clip runs for just under 10 minutes, so is ideal to watch while you are taking a *insert beverage of choice* break.

It is also available as a video PodCast, so you can download it to watch later on the QuickTime-enabled viewer of your choice.
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mylo, yet ANOTHER gizmo to lug around!

Wired reports:

Hoping to tap into the growth of wireless networks across college campuses, other public spaces and within homes, Sony is introducing a new pocket-sized gadget for instant messaging and other internet-based communications.

The Sony mylo, slated for availability in September at a retail price of about $350, is a first-of-its-kind product that uses Wi-Fi networks, analysts say. It is not a cellular phone and thus doesn't carry monthly service fees. And though it could handle web-based e-mail services, it doesn't support corporate e-mail programs.

Instead, the slim, oblong-shaped gizmo that has a 2.4-inch display and slides open to expose a thumb keyboard specifically geared toward young, mainstream consumers for messaging and internet-based calls. As long as a Wi-Fi network is accessible, a mylo user could chat away or browse the web.

The mylo — which stands for "my life online," — will be marketed toward 18-24 year-olds, the multitasking generation that relies heavily on instant messaging and is already viewing e-mail as passe, Sony said.

Sony has partnered with Yahoo and Google to integrate their instant-messaging services, and is looking to expand mylo's support to other services as well, most notably the leading messaging provider, America Online.
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It's not easy being green

The BBC published an excellent article by George Meyer (a writer for the Simpsons) that produced great waves of empathy within me. (article edited)

I'm an animal lover who wears leather shoes; a vegetarian who can't resist smoked salmon. I badger my friends to see the Al Gore movie, but I also fly on fuel-gulping jets.

Great clouds of hypocrisy swirl around me.

But even a fraud has feelings. And this summer, I'm feeling uneasy; I'm starting to think that our culture's frenzied and mindless assault on the last shreds of nature may not be the wisest course.

True, when you go for a stroll on a Sunday afternoon, nothing seems amiss. But as we know from horror movies, that's exactly when the giant alien embryos come blasting out of the sidewalk.

We're melting the ice caps, ripping up the rain forest, and vacuuming the oceans of everything that wriggles.

Since I went on my first date in high school more than 200 species of frogs have disappeared forever. Recently, polar bears and hippos were added to the threatened list. Polar bears! Hippos!

Are we really gonna wreck the whole planet? 'Cause that's a big move. That's like something a crazy stripper would do.

I know, plenty of people aren't worried. Technology will bail us out. Nothing a few pollution-eating nanobots can't fix. And if the ecosystem does collapse, we can always load ourselves into enormous rockets, and make a fresh start on Jupiter.

But here's the thing: I don't want to move to Jupiter. I don't even want to move across town. Precious knick-knacks would get broken; I'd have to order new stationery.

Once in a while, humanity will pull together for a noble cause, like tsunami relief. To save our planet, we'll need that kind of heroic effort, in which all types of people join forces for the common good.

No, really, I'm serious. For years, the environmental movement has enlisted the world's most selfless and enlightened souls. No more. We're broadening our sights; and by broadening, I mean lowering.We will now accept:

- Ignoramuses
- Poseurs
- Backstabbers
- Know-it-alls
- Opportunists
- Busybodies
- Hypocrites
- People Who Talk a Good Game
- Total Nutjobs

It's wide open. If Michael Crichton ever comes to his senses, we'll even take him. He's a big fellow, maybe he can lug around pamphlets or something. So join us. We won't judge you. If you are not currently choking a panda, welcome aboard!
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The gravity of convenience

Since the early 1990s, I have worked my way through three versions of the original model Toyota Previa. There are many reasons that I consider it the best MPV produced, one of them being its ability to comfortably transport myself, my four kidz, AND their luggage when we go away on holidays.

However if we had been strapped for space this year there is one bag I could have left behind, the one that contains my digital SLR and all its accessories.

I took hundreds of photos during my two week break with the kidz, but all of them were captured with my recently acquired Fuji F30.

There are a few things I missed about the SLR, including picture quality, operation ergonomics, zoom range and the ability to control depth of field. However on the two occasions when I did contemplate lugging the SLR with me, the convenience of popping the F30 in my pocket won me over.

Once again convenience has been the deciding factor in me adopting a technology. CDs didn't sound much better than the LPs I owned, but they were more convenient to use. My iPod doesn't sound (quite) as good as the CD player in my car, but it beats carrying 600 CDs around with me.

And the list goes on... microwave cooking, instant coffee... am I on the slippery slope to accepting second-best, or am I getting smarter, re-aligning my priorities to free-up time to devote to more important things?
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