Coolest hallway ever: Underwater with sharks in Dubai #
YouTube - Third World Record for Marshall - ok Peter, this is getting ridiculous! #
Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results - How'd they find out about my vacation? #
YouTube - Marshall sets another World Record - Wow! Peter's tearing it up...how come this didn't happen when I retired? #
Peering into the micro world - The Big Picture - Boston.com - incredible photos of microscopic (mostly) natural objects #
In 100 years - actually, in far less than that. Exciting stuff... #
Michael Crichton's creative simplifications: "He said he removed complications from his life while writing by having exactly the same food at every meal, so he never had to waste time deciding what to eat." Echoes of Flaubert? #
Chip log - Wikipedia - Wow! The term "knot" comes from the act of tying a rope attached to a piece of wood overboard and watching how many "knots" in the rope passed by in a given amount of time. #
oblong industries, inc. - the Minority Report science advisor has a company making the gestural interfaces reality. #
The web in the world - great summary of current tangible, ubiquitous, and real-world computer interactions. #
Rovio, a very cool remote (web) controlled webcam robot - not bad for $300! #
The Associated Press: US swimmer Marshall sets unlikely world record - Congratulations Peter! #
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis #
Amazing in-depth interviews about the creation of the Nintendo Wii - very cool to hear how they made the major decisions: a single remote, cartoonish avatars, the tiny console, etc... #
The shift in county-level voting over the past 16 years - pretty remarkable...interesting that Clinton was elected when the map was more "red" and Bush when it was more "blue"... #
SweetSkinz tires have wild patterns in them, and are even reflective at night. Nice idea--unfortunately only in MTB sizes so far... #
Time Magazine's "Best Inventions of 2008" - in a painful one-at-a-time UI. Favorites I hadn't seen before: a shadowless skyscraper; flying wind turbines; the MonoTracer enclosed motorcycle; enhancing food with sounds; and a braille camera for the blind #
YouTube - Awesome CNN Hologram Interview - whoa. Reason enough to have an election, if you ask me... #
Writing as sense-making: "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." - David Foster Wallace #
Dean Kamen on the interesting way they score the FIRST robotics competition - "We work really hard to 'ambivalence-scale' our competition, as we call it. We create a competition where there's a lot of luck added to it. The rounds are only 2 minutes long; the scoring system isn't particularly fair. It favors, throughout each round, the underdog...We did everything we could to make it fun enough that if your robot didn't win, it's not a personal thing. " #
High-speed photography of a parrot in flight - if I could design something 1/100th as elegant, I'd be ecstatic. Nature does it for free... #
Discount Dead On Annihilator - crazy tool with a great name. Axe, nail puller, demolition hammer, chisel, wrench...and bottle opener. #
"I scarcely spoke at all for two years. I couldn't be completely free of words, but my wife had to talk to people for me. I didn't want to say anything, make any sounds, until I was pretty sure what those sounds meant and why I wanted to use them." - R. Buckminster Fuller, explaining his two-year silence. #
A fascinating biography of Buckminster Fuller. I didn't know about his self-imposed isolation, a la Thoreau: "Fuller moved his wife, Anne, and infant daughter, Allegra, to a one-room apartment in a Chicago slum, withdrew completely from all friends and social contact, and vowed not to speak again until he really knew what he thought. And then he began to think. His virtual silence lasted for almost two years..." #
How to make a globe - I love this video. #
Fun gallery of wild Dutch bike designs at the Designhuis exhibition. My favorites: the Giant Downtown, with integrated handlebar lock; a bike you connects two bikes to make a 4-wheeled vehicle; a dinky little recumbent trike; a slick carbon recumbent; a rowing-action pullcord drivetrain; and an internal-drivetrain suspended recumbent. #
Wattzon - Profile Summary - bobryskamp - my personal energy use. Averaged out, I use roughly 11,759 watts of energy, all the time. That's 118 100-watt light bulbs burning constantly...or 2,627 gallons of oil per year. Ouch. #
Wattzon - perform your own energy use analysis. Built by Saul Griffith, whose own energy analysis I found fascinating... #
"The starting point for a new way of thinking is to give up the fantasy that there was once a golden age to which we can return. What might have been a golden age for one segment of society was a time of torture for other segments." - Fred Taylor. Good to keep in mind as we watch our most recent economic golden age crumble... #
It's striking to me that the place Christianity is growing fastest--China--is where it is limited by law to churches of fewer than 25. #
Immersive design - "The immersive design process attempts to describe two simultaneous entwined tasks: 1) To design intact worlds that are coherent, have interior logic, contain history, geography, surface, metaphor and story, and allow an audience to be fully immersed in both environment and story. 2) To put in place a non-linear immersive process that provides a fully collaborative, often virtual production space for creators and the work that they are creating." Coined by Alex McDowell, production designer for Minority Report, Fight Club, etc. #
Melee - looks like a nice distributed/digital brainstorming app, virtual sticky notes; supports clustering and prioritizing as well...will be released in a couple days #
Manta Bicycle Saddle - it's certainly different... #
One Dollar Diet Project - a couple lives on a dollar a day each for food. #
Toyota's "Winglet" personal transporter - I like this thing a lot; like a Segway you can carry around. #
"Don't just do something, sit there." - Zen saying #
Sleeping in a room with a fan lowers a baby’s risk of sudden infant death syndrome by 72 percent. Wild. #
The ZAP Alias seems similar in approach to the Aptera, but with a shape that seems more palatable today. #
SuperUse, a new PBS show about designers building things from found waste. "Generally, architects...make a final design and then find the proper materials to make the vision real. But what we do is look at the materials that are there and incorporate them in the project that we have...so it's kind of backwards thinking." #
ThinkGeek :: MicroFly Tiny R/C Hovering UFO - looks like way too much fun. #
"Thus even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster...In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet." - Kevin Kelly. Exciting stuff--I'd agree that the questions seem only to be getting bigger: climate change, world economies, the web. #
MamaMikes.com - cool service that allows you to send payments and gifts to anyone in Kenya and Uganda; everything from flowers to cell phone minutes to fuel vouchers. Meant mostly for the African diaspora... #
Very slick: a zero-energy humidifier made of water-resistant paper that forces water into tiny droplets, which evaporate more easily. A good cooling strategy as well... #
Kevin Kelly's final statements about what the web will be in 5000 more days: "There is only One machine. The web is its OS." Sounds really similar to the Islamic Shahada...coincidence? I also like his earlier quote, that "We have to get better at believing the impossible." #
Free University in Internet - despite his grammar woes, this guy has uploaded and organized hundreds of videos on Google to create his own online "university". Awesome. #
Halloween contact lenses - way too tempting... #
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand; And a Heaven in a Wild Flower; Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand; And Eternity in an hour." - William Blake, Auguries of Innocence #
Always push the bees the way they want to go - Gerald Cooper. As Russell says, about the best advice you'll hear anywhere. #