Swine Flu map mashup

Google Map Mashup of the latest incidences and news on the spread of the Swine Flu (H1N1).

I wonder how long it will be before someone connects this to Google’s Latitude service. That way you could know whether you are close to someone who is infected, as well as which route to take to avoid them.

Jetlev Flyer

Yes, I know it looks ridiculous. But this can’t be ignored as it will take you at 75kph across the water. Still no word on pricing. Isn’t it just a very strong water pump and a couple of nozzles?

[[ JetLev ]]

Cognitive Surplus

Excellent concept:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

From a larger essay on the topic by Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Site hack

So back up after a kind tip that this blog had been hacked (ca 30 sex links added to the previous post with hidden link tags that showed up in RSS feeds… fun!). Interesting how it only seemed to hit a few posts, not necessarily the newest ones either. It seems like it was a bot hack on an outdated wordpress installation rather than a targeted hit. Having your own site means you need to do a little housecleaning once and again, but I still wish there was some kind of warning in the admin panel for security upgrades.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) + One for you

OLPC just started their “give 1 get 1″ program… they are only offering this for the next couple of weeks, so grab your 200USD XO Laptop while you can. I have ordered one for general hacking. Before buying, you can play with the Sugar interface here. Supposedly it will also run Pepper.

Giving slime legs

So, there’s this article which discusses how researchers in the UK and Japan have figured out how to wire a robot to slime grown in a mould. The particular slime they chose shies away from the light. The researchers then grew the slime on a six-sided star shaped culture backed by a circuit connected to a six-legged robot. Whenever the slime grows into a particular side of the culture,the underlying circuit moves the corresponding leg so the robot moves out of the light. The article focuses on the technological wizardry of getting a robot to move without the aid of a processor and a light detector, as well as the possibility of mounting the culture directly on the robot, so that no additional equipment is necessary.

I think this is all very fascinating, but shouldn’t there be more discussion about whether we want to give the Physarum polycephalum slime legs? In my experience, encounters with slimy things have generally been unpleasant until the moment they were wiped away with detergent or walked away from. I am not particularly interested in adding slime to the list of pests (mosquitos, flies, moths) that I have to chase after, even if it has cool robotic legs and cowers under the glare of my flashlight.

Steampunk

Steampunk seems to be a growing trend. As everything around us begins to look just a little too slick (User Interfaces, iPods), we are starving the part of ourselves that enjoys rummaging through stalls along Portobello Road. Products designed to look futuristic are great because they add functionality and stand out from everything else we interact with. However, once your shoehorn looks and feels just as futuristic as your iPod, the futuristic “feel” becomes meaningless. Steampunk is a great next step because the user experience and “feel” of the products is drastically different, although the modern functionality is retained. The basic Steampunk recipe is to keep a modern technological core and slap on a 19th Century “skin” (usually consisting of lots of rivets and polished brass- think Jules Verne). If there is growing demand, it seems like an easy way to make money as the investment is mostly in the “skin” and not in technological innovation.

Here are a couple of examples…

Steampunk Keyboard Mod

Les Montres Vianney Halter
Obscenely expensive watches. Watchismo has a good description of the Antiqua watch pictured below.

Skype VoIP WiFi Phone, just add Video

It seems like Belkin and Netgear are developing their Skype products in a daze. First, both of their phones are getting lukewarm reviews for a variety of reasons.

Secondly, although the WiFi connection has plenty of bandwidth to spare above the Skype voice connection, they don’t come with any sort of camera. Given that almost *every* cellphone now has a camera, and the limiting factor to their use is always bandwidth (except 3G), there is absolutely no reason that these two companies could not include a video camera to enable videoconferencing with Skype over WiFi. Killer product waiting to happen, if you ask me.