Invent a New Future

The term “green Google” is particularly interesting, and who is to say that YOU are not the person/group that is going make the difference–there is definitely opportunity out there. Listen, if we are on the eve of the energy technology revolution, it is going to take all of us working together to come out on the other side as winners. Get into the action in any way that you can. Here’s a question: Does drilling get us to the point where we will never have this sort of problem again?

From: Change is a Revolution

 

Contact lenses with circuits for superhuman vision

Can you imagine having screen directly on your eye like movie characters from the Terminator or Bionic Woman? Maybe not for having virtual crosshairs or zoom in on far-off scenes, but for more practical use like having virtual displays for visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects. (more…)

©2008 Scientific, embedded, biomedical, electronics contents.. All Rights Reserved.

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(Via Scientific, embedded, biomedical, electronics contents..)

 

Seagate’s CEO Comes Clean: ‘I help people watch porn’

It’s not often that a CEO is honest about the products they sell. Luckily for us, Seagate’s Bill Watkins did just that.

Let’s face it, we’re not changing the world. We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn.

Don’t forget pirating media, Bill. - Jason Chen

Seagate CEO: I help people “watch porn” [CNN - Thanks Blair!]

(Via Gizmodo.)

 

Why the use of supplemental oxygen in spud guns is a bad idea

(Via Notes From the Technology Underground.)

 

Paintball minigun

Filed under: misc hacks

Every so I often I Google “paintball minigun“. This time it actually turned up something good. Special effects builder Rick Galinson has been working on a… wait for it… paintball minigun (cache). There is a video of a dry fire run on his site. He’s apparently having trouble with the triggers; I just want to know how he plans on loading it.

Rick has a lot of other cool projects. He’s got a cool two arm minigun prop (cache) (looks like Monev the Gale), A remote controlled submarine (cache), and a really cool telemetry suit (cache) for collecting upper body movement data.

For completeness’ sake you can check out Monty’s Miniguns for information on other paintball miniguns and miniguns in general.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

(Via hack a day.)

 

Free Airport Wi-fi List

It’s amazing to me when an airport doesn’t have free wi-fi. I know it’s another way to make money, but in an industry that goes bankrupt every few years anyway, why not give fliers golden EVDO cards upon entering a carrier’s terminal?

Wi-fi Free Spot posted a list of airports with free wi-fi. Biggies like Dallas and Chicago (Midway and O’hare) aren’t on the list - which is a shame. In fact, most airports with free wi-fi are smaller (which on one hand makes sense - expense - and on the other hand does not - resources).

Hit the jump for their best tip to find free wi-fi at any airport. And let us know if you have any wi-fi tips for travelers. - Mark Wilson

Free Wi-Fi in Airports [via randomgoodstuff]
ImageLink

“A Pilot has told me that most FBO’s (Fixed Base Operators are the service stations for corporate aircraft) which are located at almost all airports large and small are offering unrestricted WIFI service in their facilities. Go to the general aviation facility for any airport, ask where corporate aircraft arrive and depart, go into the facility and ask them if you can use the WIFI capability. Most of these FBO’s have waiting areas and some provide separate computer rooms (like a large phone booth) as well as the ability to print.”

(Via Gizmodo.)

 

Russia Plans Floating Nuke Plant, Thousands of Fish Protest

It won’t be ready till 2010, but Russian nuclear energy company Rosenergoatom is planning to build a $200-million mobile plant to bring electricity to the hard-to-reach territories near the White Sea. The football-size barge will have two reactors and be launched/floated toward a port near the mainland where it’d be connected to power lines and bring electricity to potentially 200,000 people. Rosenergoatom, however, won’t comment on the type of safety measures they’d take into consideration. Our advice, stay away from Russian seafood in the next 20 or so years. -Louis Ramirez

via PopSci

(Via Gizmodo.)

 

Sunlight Direct Hybrid Solar Lighting

By Andrew Liszewski

All I can say is that I’m really glad power and utilities are included where I live because I can’t imagine what my monthly bills would be like otherwise. If I ever end up living in a place where I actually was responsible for paying the power company each month I would most definitely have these hybrid solar lights installed.

The idea is pretty simple. Small, satellite dish-sized solar collectors that are capable of tracking and focusing the sun’s light are installed on the roof of your building. These dishes are then connected to fiber optic cables which carry the sunlight to special hybrid solar lighting fixtures that can provide as much light as a standard lightbulb would. Of course for days where little sunlight is available the fixtures also include regular electric lights to compensate, hence the term ‘hybrid’.

[Hybrid Solar Lighting] VIA [SlashGear]

(Via OhGizmo!.)

 

Remember Ring heats up on your anniversary

Cory Doctorow:

The “Remember Ring” is programmed to breifly heat up to 120 deg F every hour on the hour on a specific date — such as your anniversary. It powers itself with a “micro thermopile” that turns heat from your hand into stored electricity that runs its internal clock and the heater.

Link

(via Gizmodo)

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes.

Xeni Jardin:
Update: Earlier today, I asked a Justice Department spokesperson which search engines other than Google received requests to provide search records. The answer: Yahoo, AOL, and MSN were also asked to supply search records information, and all complied. Google did not, and that is why the DoJ asked a federal judge on Wednesday to order the company to do so.

Another fact to consider as you sift through news coverage: Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend its argument that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutionally sound.

It seems apparent that Google objected to the request not for privacy reasons, but on grounds that the request was too broad and burdensome. Privacy advocates I spoke to today, including attorney Sherwin Siy at EPIC, say while the DoJ’s request would not identify individual users, the scope and nature of this request sets a troubling precedent. Today, they argue, only search strings and urls; tomorrow, perhaps, the IP addresses of all users who typed in “Osama Bin Laden.”

Update 2: Here are PDF copies of the documents filed on Jan. 18 by Justice Department attorneys in Gonzales v. Google, Inc.: Motion to Compel, Declaration of Joel McElvain, and Declaration of Philip Stark.

Update 4: An AOL spokesperson disputes the Justice Department’s statement that it complied with records request. More here.

Over at SearchEngineWatch, Danny Sullivan has an extensive and much-updated post about news that the Justice Department demanded search records data from Google….

---

——

Google has refused to comply with the subpoena. A motion has been filed this week by US Department Of Justice to force Google to hand over the data. In particular, the Bush administration wanted one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one week period. The government apparently wants to estimate how much pornography shows up in the searches that children do. Here’s a thought. If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate.

Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you’re going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you’d get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you’re add it. They won’t skew the data at all, nope.95

Moreover, since the data is divorced from user info, you have no idea what searches are being done by children or not. In the end, you’ve asked for a lot of data that’s not really going to help you estimate anything at all.

He has since updated the post to reflect responses from other search engines on whether they, too, were asked to supply search data to the DoJ. According to Danny, Yahoo was asked and complied. MSN issed a statement which doesn’t really answer the question, which suggests that they were asked and complied. Ask Jeeves was not asked.

Danny writes,

In fairness to Yahoo, which handed over information — and MSN which likely did the same — it is important to note that it is not just spin that no privacy issues were involved with this particular data. As I explained in the story, the information is completely divorced from any personally identifiable data.

Link.

Previously:
Feds demand user data from Google: Battelle’s analysis
DoJ demands user search records from Google
——

Google has refused to comply with the subpoena. A motion has been filed this week by US Department Of Justice to force Google to hand over the data. In particular, the Bush administration wanted one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one week period. The government apparently wants to estimate how much pornography shows up in the searches that children do. Here’s a thought. If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate.

Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you’re going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you’d get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you’re add it. They won’t skew the data at all, nope.95

Moreover, since the data is divorced from user info, you have no idea what searches are being done by children or not. In the end, you’ve asked for a lot of data that’s not really going to help you estimate anything at all.

He has since updated the post to reflect responses from other search engines on whether they, too, were asked to supply search data to the DoJ. According to Danny, Yahoo was asked and complied. MSN issed a statement which doesn’t really answer the question, which suggests that they were asked and complied. Ask Jeeves was not asked.

Danny writes,

In fairness to Yahoo, which handed over information — and MSN which likely did the same — it is important to note that it is not just spin that no privacy issues were involved with this particular data. As I explained in the story, the information is completely divorced from any personally identifiable data.

Link.

Previously:
Feds demand user data from Google: Battelle’s analysis
DoJ demands user search records from Google

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

Alaska to dude: no nuclear particle accelerators in your house!

Xeni Jardin:
Snip from a report I filed for Wired News:

Albert Swank Jr., a 55-year-old civil engineer in Anchorage, Alaska, is a man with a mission. He wants to install a nuclear particle accelerator in his home. But when neighbors learned of plans to place the 20-ton device inside the house where Swank operates his engineering firm, their response was swift: Not in my backyard.

Local lawmakers rushed to introduce emergency legislation banning the use of cyclotrons in home businesses. State health officials took similar steps, and have suspended Swank’s permit to operate cyclotrons on his property.

“Some of the neighbors who are upset about the cyclotron have started calling it SHAFT — Swank’s high-energy accelerator for tomography,” attorney Alan Tesche said. “Part of what’s got everyone so upset is we’re not sure when it’s going to arrive on the barge. We know Anchorage is gonna get the SHAFT, but we just don’t know when.” Tesche is also the local assemblyman who represents the area where Swank and his cyclotron would reside.

Johns Hopkins University agreed to donate the used cyclotron, which is roughly six feet tall by eight feet wide, to Swank’s business, Langdon Engineering and Management. The devices are relatively scarce in Alaska, and are used to produce radioactive substances that can be injected into patients undergoing PET scans.

Link.

Image: When Mr. Swank was 17, he built this cyclotron at his home — in the same living room where he wants to install the larger, 20-ton model from Johns Hopkins (actually, it weighs more like 40 tons when you include all the shielding and stuff).

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

The world’s lightest solid finds myriad other applications

November 29, 2005 When we first wrote about aerogel, we treated it as somewhat of a technological novelty. Aerogel is 99.8% air and 1,000 times less dense than glass yet it can withstand high temperature, delivering 39 times more insulation than the best fibreglass. This exotic substance was invented in the 1930s but has been refined by NASA in recent times for the purpose of catching space-dust. Now it has been recognised that aerogel’s unique properties are in fact very applicable to some of man’s greatest challenges. Its unique nanostructure offers higher electrochemical surface areas, better mass transport, reduced or eliminated ionic contamination and price competitiveness – in short, lower cost and higher performance compared to current membranes on the market, making it ideal as a high performance electro-catalyst for fuel cells, non-electro-catalysts for emissions control, and aerogel materials for energy storage.
..

(Via Gizmo Emerging Technology Magazine.)

 

‘32 Ford Hybrid Conversion

Brett Singleton, a student at a Utah technology college is converting a ‘32 Ford from a not-so-enviro-friendly lead-fueled engine over to a primarily electric hybrid engine. The engine Singleton is designing is different from other hybrid engines because it is primarily going to run on the electric motor rather than a gas engine. Singleton is working on this project with other peers and plans to release his system into a kit that will allow any environmental savvy hot-rodder to do similar conversions.

Utah Student Building Hybrid ‘32 Ford [Treehugger]

(Via Gizmodo.)

 

The Eye Telescope

By David Ponce

So, it seems a company called Visioncare has come up with a tiny “telescope” that can be implanted in your eye. And no, no, it’s not for you to play bionic man with. Instead, it’s for people with age-related macular degeneration. That’s medspeak for when your retina starts going down the pooper. The implant gives you a 3X magnification, and focuses the light onto the parts of the retina that still work. It’s meant to be used on one eye, with central vision, while the other eye focuses on the periphery.

Story VIA Gadgetmadness.

(Via OhGizmo!.)

 

Measure Bullet Speed With Your Computer and a Microphone

By using audio recording software such as Audacity, it should be possible to calculate the speed of bullets fired at metal targets by measuring the time it takes the sound of impact to reach the microphone after the bullet has been fired. This would be useful as both a basic chronograph, and for ballistics studies of various bullet shapes.

Now, a word about the speed of sound. According to Wikipedia, the speed of sound in air varies only with temperature according to this formula:

Speed (m/s) = 331.5 + 0.6*Temp(°C)

So for our purposes, the speed of the bullet would be:, minus the time it took the sound to come back from the target:

Bs = Dtarget /(Ttotal – (Dtarget / (331.5+0.6*°C)))

where Bs is the speed of the bullet, Dtarget is the distance to the target, and Ttotal is the total time from when the gun was fired and the impact was heard.

 

DIY Railgun

We’ve hit on a few EM projectile systems recently, so [Jason Rollette] thought it would be a good time to cover his railgun. I couldn’t agree more. Jason has been keeping his Railgun Blog up-to-date from nearly day one. Right now he is assembling a larger capacitor bank to power the gun. The PVC piping you see in the picture is part of the injection rig; If the projectile is stationary when the gun is fired it would get welded to the rails (if not worse). Check out Jason’s Railgun Blog for details on his project plus a lot of informative links.

(Via hack a day.)

 

Electricity Generating Solar Glass

By David Ponce

You know, there’s all this talk about solar power. And I think it’s great. One of the major hurdles against it being implemented more widely though, is finding a place for all the solar panels. Well, California company XSunX might have found a very innovative solution: solar generating glass, called Power Glass.

Think of all the glass real estate in America today, all the skyscrapers… Now imagine all that glass generating electricity and doing something useful for a change.

XsunX has focused on the development of very thin semi-transparent coatings and films that create large area monolithic solar cell structures that you can see through. This semi-transparency makes Power Glass™ glazing desirable for placing over glass, plastics, and other see-through structures. Using patented processes, such as reel-to-reel manufacturing techniques and multi-terminal cell structure designs, we are working to commercialize large area cell manufacturing processes for thin film flexible plastics.

Sounds promising. Don’t know that it’s being marketed just yet, but there you have it.

Visit the XSunX website. Story VIA New Launches.

(Via OhGizmo!.)

 

Robotic sentry gun

Aaron Rasmussen and his brother Ezra built this cute robotic sentry gun. The gun is an airsoft replica of an FN P90 and fires 6mm BBs. Pan and tilt are controlled by two hobby servos using a simple controller. Aaron wrote custom software to watch the usb webcam and track targets. There is a video on the site of it being tested… on Ezra.

(Via hack a day.)

 

Animator envisions sub-dermal displays

Note to Hart and Huntington tattoo shop: you guys so need to hook up with Gina Miller, a designer and animator who is looking to make your business totally obsolete. Obviously seeing a bright future in implanted devices, Seattle-based Miller, with help from nanotech author Robert A. Freitas Jr., has finished her concept-animation project that envisions a dermal display system consisting of billions of nanobots that can self-assemble and emit photons to form text and graphics directly on the skin. While user-changeable tattoos are the most obvious implementation of this technology, Freitas proposes the more “practical” deployment of using pixelbots to display info gathered from the army of healthbots that will one day run amok in our bloodstreams. The futuristic system also promises to be touch sensitive, allowing you to send a message back to your nano-friends telling them to get the hell out of your prostate.

[Via Medgadget]

 

Optware to Release 30 GB Holographic Card for Less than $1 at the End of 2006

I didn’t hear about this from my normal sources (Engadget, Gizmodo, etc, etc) which I find odd. It’s also pretty old - dated June 8, 2005.

Optware Corp., a developer of holographic data storage systems, is planning to release a Holographic Versatile Card (HVC) media product around the end of 2006. The card capacity is expected to be 30 GB. The company aims to price the product around ¥100. Optware also intends to set the price of a reader device lower than ¥200,000 and a reader/writer device lower than ¥1 million. The launch of these HVC-related products is planned to coincide with the standardization of the technology, expected in December, 2006, by Ecma International, an organization promoting standardization of information and communication technologies. The company also revealed photos of mockups. Dimensions of the card are almost the same as those of a credit card, while the drive system is designed to be the size of a surface-mounted hard disc drive system.

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