Nintendo Blood Glucose Meter

The pharmaceutical company Bayer has created a blood glucose meter that plugs into a Nintendo DS. It's called the DIDGET. This gadget includes a game that is both (allegedly) fun and educational for children living with diabetes.

via Boing Boing

Soviet Visions of the Future

io9 presents a gallery of images from a 1970 Soviet publication on future technologies entitled Teknika Molodezhi. It's a fascinating look at a world that never, ever, could have emerged from the Soviet Union.

Zeray Gazette Readers, Put On Your Brain Slugs

Jeff the Baptist is facing a problem: there are huge piles of snow in front of his house. Because of their low surface area to mass ratios, it'll take a long time for them to melt. Since he's an engineer, he's trying to engineer a solution to this problem:

My second thought is to stab some aluminum strips into the heart of the larger piles. Aluminum is an excellent heat conductor and is available in a number of forms at the local hardware store. If I can find some cheap strips (preferably black), I can essentially conduct heat into the heart of the pile. I could put them in in the morning and then pull them when I got home so they wouldn't cool the piles during the night. Not sure if they'd work, but it might be neat to try.

Jeff is soliciting technical suggestions on how to remove the snow. If you have any, you can write them in his comments section. Or for more fun, you could excessively complicated, expensive, and preferably dangerous solutions in my comments.

This is a contest. The most preposterous and/or reckless proposal wins.

WINNER: rocksalive777:

One word: Napalm.
Multiple words: Napalm lit without the aid of time-delayed fuse. Instead, the source of ignition is a torch, which is delivered to the incendiary via an Olympic-style relay. Through bear infested woods.

Of the suggestions, I found this to be the most immediately dangerous, although there would be long-term dangers to smoking/eating Jeff's tomacco.

Would Captain Kirk's Anti-Gorn Cannon Actually Work?

In the episode "Arena" of the original Star Trek series, Captain Kirk builds a cannon out of a bamboo log, diamonds, coal, saltpeter, and sulfur. Would it actually have worked? In a few days, Mythbusters will debut an episode which tests the hypothesis. Below, you can view the promo:



Video Link via Topless Robot

Remote-Controlled Human

Look at the picture. When the man moves his joystick to the left, the helmet on the girl’s head pulls her left ear, signally that she should go left. When he moves his joystick to the right, the opposite occurs.

Thomas Ricker of Engadget speculates about the one application for this device from Kajimoto Laboratory: a navigation aid for the blind. With a GPS system added, it could be used to give the visually impaired greater independence.

But I have another in mind: a wife-trainer. With some additions, this could be used to train a wife to follow instructions, just by tugging on her ears as needed.

Will it work? Well, there's only one way to find out for sure!

UPDATE: No, it will not. The apparatus suffered a catastrophic mechanical/anatomical failure. I declare the experiment unsuccessful.

Old Geezers and Technology

The younger you are, the more you tend to be an early adapter of newer technologies. So Jeff the Baptist got to wondering what future technologies his kids might berate him about not adapting:

• Jeez dad, why do you keep using these old mp3 players? Don't you know everything's on audio crystals now?


• I know. My dad is still listening to music with his ears. I keep telling him he can get it piped straight into his audio center in higher fidelity now. Especially with his hearing.


• Well he probably refuses to mindjack onto the connected global consciousness anyway.


• Yeah, my parents will only get on using a hardline. I keep telling them that the info cloud is subspace accessible now, but the idea of instantaneous high bandwidth connectivity inside their heads freaks them out. They still make me talk to them with words! It takes me forever to tell them anything! Like whole minutes even!

Heh. I can imagine my little girl saying one day "Dad's so slow. He can only play two video games at once."

The World is a Better Place Because of Engineers

I think that we should all take a moment to give thanks to the engineers in our lives, without whom we would not be living in this modern, technological paradise. Truly, we live in an age of marvels because a whole segment of the human race has devoted itself to making scientific advances useful. For example:

The iBum Chair


Problem: photocopiers are expensive, uncomfortable, and generally can’t support the weight of an adult human. So photocopying your butt is an exceedingly difficult and potentially dangerous process.

Solution: a chair with a built-in photocopier that will automatically take pictures of your butt.

Next example:

The bikini that dissolves in water

I don't think that I need to explain the utility of such a garment. It's quite obvious.

And for these feats of technology -- and countless others -- we have engineers to thank.

So take a moment to thank the engineers in your life for what they do. Jeff the Baptist, Keith Taylor, Dad, thank you for making the world a better place.

There, I Fixed It

There, I Fixed It is a photoblog of jerry-rigged repair jobs and technical solutions, such as this "fixed" windshield defroster.

HT: Neatorama

Nobody Tell Gavin Richardson About This New Technology

He's an "early adopter" on everything, and we need to prevent him from jumping into this one: an office chair has been equipped with sensors to publish a tweet on a twitter feed every time someone farts on it.

HT: Neatorama

Celebrate Human Achievement Day

Today, at 8:30 PM, turn on every light in your house and celebrate the wonders of humanity's conquest of the darkness. For we are our own Prometheus, and we have left the blackened caves of our ancestors to accomplish great marvels.

Tonight, bathe in the light that comes not from nature, but from the forges of human ingenuity.

Vise Grips Stories

Popular Mechanics has an article up on that marvelous wonder tool: vise grips. The magazine asked readers to submit stories about how people have used them in creative ways, such as clamping a gushing artery, dipping cannolis in hot oil, and holding a bridal bouquet together. Here's my favorite:

Back in my college days, my best friend and I traveled from Moorhead to Hibbing for an impromptu bear hunt. The year was 1973, and my trusty 1963 Mercury Meteor's shift lever broke off at 3:00 a.m. I promptly clamped my Vise-Grip on a shard of metal sticking out of the column. The "shifter" sufficed for 690 miles on logging roads. By the way, we did get a bear!"

Well, when I was about 20, I decided to throw a surprise birthday party for my Mom. So I bought a pinata, but was unable to find a way to hang it up anywhere in our apartment that would permit her to smack at it with a stick. So my Dad cleverly hung the pinata from his vice grips, which he attached to the top of a door frame. My Mom was delighted.

Okay, so it's not the most impressive vise grips story. But I did learn how critical and handy it is to have them around.

Click here for a history of vise grip pliers.

Twitter Throughout History

And Gavin always thinks that he's ahead of the curve for early-adopting into new social networking tools. Ha!

Follow the link for Tweets from Australopithecus, Adolf Hitler, and Julius Ceasar.

HT: Neatorama

Everything is Amazing Yet Nobody is Happy

[Video Link] Comedian Louis CK offers a dose of reality on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Astounding technologies are available to consumers today, yet nobody is content with the miracle machines in their pockets. "How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago."

HT: Neatorama

Technology Has Gone Too Far: The Robo-Urinal

This is what happens when mechanical engineers have too much time on their hands.

Yes, I understand how it could make the, uh, process...easier. But I'll handle this myself.

So to speak.

H/T

ANOTHER THOUGHT: For a variety of reasons, this is a robot that should never be given artificial intelligence.

Maybe I Should Get an iPhone

I barely use my own cell phone. Really, I only keep it on me for emergency purposes. But this Saturday Night Live commercial makes a good case for having and advanced, multi-function device like the iPhone.

[Video Link]

As I Always Suspected

Via Neatorama

My New Invention

I think that any parent can see the immediate applications of this new stroller accessory. In fact, it's amazing that no one has thought of this before.

With a six pound rifle and a two pound scabbard on one side, it does throw the balance off a bit. Like an old shopping cart.

Note that in the event of a zombie attack, you really are better off just picking up the baby and running. A stroller will only slow you down.

Standing Athwart History, Yelling "Stop!"

Useless Pop Technology

When I first bought a cell phone, I sent a text message to my wife's phone in order to learn how to do it. Since then, I have never sent a text message. I have never needed to. I would rather express myself faster and easier with voicemail than give myself arthritis by poking laboriously at tiny cell phone buttons. Along these lines, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker is highly skeptical of the many 'features' on his cell phone:

It is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary "features" aimed at idiots, including a mode that scans each text message and turns some of the words into tiny ani- mations, so if someone texts to say they have just run over your child in their car, the word "car" is replaced by a wacky cartoon vehicle putt-putting onto the screen. There is also a crap built-in game in which you play a rabbit ("Step into the role of Bobby Carrot - the new star of cute, mind-cracking carrot action!").

When you dial a number, you have a choice of seeing said number in a gigantic, ghastly typeface, or watching it moronically scribbled on parchment by an animated quill. I can't find an option to see it in small, uniform numbers. The whole thing is the visual equivalent of a moronic clip-art jumble sale poster designed in the dark by a myopic divorcee experiencing a freak biorhythmic high. Worst of all, it seems to have an unmarked omnipresent shortcut to Orange's internet service, which means that whether you are confused by the menu, or the typeface, or the user- confounding buttons, you are never more than one click away from accidentally plunging into an overpriced galaxy of idiocy, which, rather than politely restricting itself to news headlines and train timetables, thunders "BUFF OR ROUGH? GET VOTING!" and starts hurling cameraphone snaps of "babes and hunks" in their underwear at you, presumably because some pin-brained coven of marketing gonks discovered the average Orange internet user was teenage and incredibly stupid, so they set about mercilessly tailoring all their "content" toward priapic halfwits, thereby assuring no one outside this slim demographic will ever use their gaudy, insulting service ever again. And then they probably reached across the table and high-fived each other for skilfully delivering "targeted content" or something, even though what they should really have done, if there was any justice in the world, is smash the desk to pieces, select the longest wooden splinters they could find, then drive them firmly into their imbecilic, atrophied, world-wrecking rodent brains.

My phone offers a variety of ringtones, and I know that I can purchase whatever sound I wish online and load it into my cell phone. But I prefer the simple, discreet sound of a ringing telephone, which is the default setting.

My old phone -- the one that died in a washing machine -- made a beep when it turned on. My new phone plays a long cascade of notes, which I cannot turn off. This is inconvenient when I find that I have left on my phone in some place improper, like class or church, and must turn it off.

I don't have a mp3 player, nor an IPod. I don't even have a stereo in my car, and barely a functional radio. It stays off anyway, because I like the quiet of driving. The sheer lack of sound in my car is soothing in a world of endless noise: ringtones that play Welcome to the Jungle, cars with stereos so loud that my car vibrates when I stop next to them at a red light, and display TVs with the volume turned all the way up at the Wal-Mart.

Later in the column, Brooker attacks the concept of 'bling':

The word "bling" refers to any unnecessary accumulation of metal or jewellery which impresses the simple-minded. Examples of bling-related activity include: driving a car with shiny platinum rims, arriving at a movie premiere in a hat made of glittering diamonds, or pointing at a big block of gold and cooing away for hours on end like an unforgivable moron whose mere existence ultimately cheapens us all. Bling is the single most shallow, boring and wilfully superficial cultural phenomenon ever to excite humankind, which is saying something for a species already hooked on internet poker.

Hat tip: Instapundit