I was cracking up when I saw this. 1 frog… 2 frogs… …
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Check these out! Two guys from the UK designed a series of robots that mimic some of the carnivorous plants in the wild. Well, kind of. These robots are functional, like a lamp that attracts bugs, and then “eats” them so it can continue to provide light. That’s cool. Or a mechanical art piece –I made the “art piece” part up, I think it would be a cool art piece actually– that steals flies from spiderwebs, then eats them to help out with the movement required to steal them in the first place. Neat huh? Check it out. UK-based designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau believe that, if robots are ever to be welcomed into people’s homes, they’ll need to fit in with the rest of the furniture, and earn their keep. Their prototypes trap and digest pests like flies and mice to gain energy…. the full thing is right here Gallery – Carnivorous robots eager to eat your pests RIP Farrah Fawcett. Thanks for all the entertainment.
Check out this report about a teeny airport that gets Millions of dollars from OUR taxes for basically nothing! They sometimes average 20 passengers a day! Yet for each one of those, about $100.00 from your taxes pays for the running of the airlines to and from this airport. Unfreaking believable. I learned a new word today. Anthropocentrism. I read it in this document, which talks about two groups of people. The nonconsumptive recreationists and the consumptive recreationists in the South Island of New Zealand. The difference between the two groups pivots on their view of how we should use the environment. For example, a nonconsumptive recreationist is one that does not take anything from nature, while the consumptive recreationist does. As with anything, I think there is a happy medium in between. Anthropocentrism is the idea that we –as humans– are the supreme beings over everything else in this planet, basically that all things should be made to, or arranged to, developed or whatever you want for our own benefit. I don’t adhere to this 100%, I think we need to respect the other living organisms on this planet because they’re part of the entire ecosystem. I love fishing, and so you might classify me into the consumptive group, but I also like other activities that would be classified as nonconsumptive, like kayaking, hiking, snorkeling and stuff. I think that the different activities that make you fall into either one of the groups aren’t mutually exclusive, for example, I could go out on a kayak and enjoy some whale watching, or even snorkeling, but what if at the same time, while I’m out there I decide to cast a line and fish a little. Is it wrong to eat the fish I catch? Of course not, but I think it would be not wrong, but actually despicable to fish or hunt just for thrill of it. If you’re not going to use it then leave it alone. An extreme Anthropocentric person usually believes that we have the right to exert our dominance over every other species regardless of the repercussions. Like slaughtering buffaloes for their skin, rhinos for their horns, or butchering live sharks for their fins, that simply isn’t right. Anyway, hopefully now you know a new word. Peace out. This is pretty cool, a few days ago I read about this.
Updated information: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/051809dnmettwittersurg.1517883a.html  Alert the codex police, we need it back up! Err… ya, that’s a problem…  The site did load once but it wasn't working right. I read a very interesting article in the whole issue of privacy. Particularly as it pertains to disclosing personal information to “3rd parties.” If this is something of interest to you, I recommend you take a look. when it comes to privacy, what people do and what they say don’t always correspond. It also shows that if the right design decisions are made and proper control and assurance given about personal data, that in fact, very few people would not be willing to disclose such information. (link) So how much information are you willing to give out? I know I hate giving my stuff out to anyone, regardless of what kind of security they think they’ve put in place to protect my information. I know that there are certain entities that must have my personal data, but for the most part I think I don’t give out information willingly. The article also mentions a system much like Pandora or the Genius thing on iTunes. Do you realize that each of those applications we use, such as Pandora, have the ability to aggregate the data they have and create pretty accurate profiles of who we are? Of course, we know this, its how they are able to give me one type of advertisement different from what they show other people. Great! you can say, that is their goal. But what happens when somebody like Google, for example buys a company like Pandora. Google is particularly different than every other company, but even though it is the exception of what I’m about to say, it is large enough that it deserves special mention. A company like Google, that already knows you inside out pretty much –if they wanted to, goes out and buys Pandora, not only did they already have a very good understanding of who you are, what you like, what you don’t like, your habits, your schedule even! Now they know, within a super finite degree of accuracy which music you like. Not just the genre and style, but specifically which song, from which album. Aggregate that with say… the time of day’s when you clicked “I like that song” then add the geographical location when you clicked it, and now they know that at X-time, at X-location they should give you X-ad. Taking into account all your other habits and information they already know, it would be hard to show you the wrong ad. Do you see how Google makes money and will continue to do so!? So you rate a song in Pandora here and there, you join a Facebook group over here, you “follow” certain people. You belong to insert your social network here, and after a while, really your privacy is nil. If you were to aggregate these little bits of information, you would have absolutely 0 privacy, imagine that the ability to aggregate all that information fell in the wrong hands –not just your public info, but the private information as well–, now that would be a scary day. note: this is a couple of weeks old and I just got to release it. I’m also trying out the ScribeFire extension to do some blogging, we’ll see if this works.Technorati Tags: privacy, google, data aggregation Oh noes! snakes on a motherfu**ing plane! http://tinyurl.com/dh7jhc where’s Sam L Jackson when you need him?
I need to test Google’s newest feature. The Gmail autopilot. Or its probably showing up for you on your gmail account too, thats how I found it. This is awesome, I don’t even have to be here to reply to your e-mail anymore.
I just finished watching this video. It sounds great, now onto finding a way to justify a $2500 purchase. Yikes! 21.1 megapixel, and full 1080 hi-def video. Amazing. Update 03/26. Bummer, I didn’t realize this is a full frame camera so I would have to get all new lenses, the lenses I have for my xti wouldn’t work for this body so that alone certainly delays the purchase of this camera for me. I just can’t spend all the $ all over again on new lenses… especially when I know the lenses are going to be more expensive anyway than their counterparts that I currently have. I can’t imagine the price of my 11-18 lens for this camera. Yikes. Full specs are here straight from the horses’ mouth and they’re as impressive as I thought initially. If you do any kind of document creation, specifically creative type, you need to take a look at this software from Gridironsoftware. I just saw the March 02 Podcast for photoshop user tv, and they had a demo it blew me away. It is the best “reverse” mind-mapping process flow management tool I’ve ever seen, it works on the mac and it just “works.” It will keep track of all the work you do on any document or project you need to track and it displays the information in a very useful map. The map allows you to identify the location of any file used in the project, how many versions you’ve saved, which other documents you’ve used the file in. Another couple of cool features are that it shows you the “ripple effect” of changing one file, and allows you to track time worked on a project for time estimates and billing purposes. Let me explain the ripple effect (although you should just watch the demo). If you have a book for example, and you decide to make a change to one of your images, it will have a map showing you all the other places you have used this image on so you can then go edit those places to accommodate the change. This is a for me, as a photographer, a process flow dream. For me as a web designer, a time saver. As a marketer, this adds so much value to the product. Imagine how easy it would be to modify the logo for an entire company’s corporate image. Change the base image and follow the map to apply the changes on any other document (pdfs, envelopes, letterhead, website logos, etc) that uses it.
It allows you to track time spent on a project, it has built in version control, and it talks to your applications in their language. It knows that my file has 18 layers, and what each layer does. And it will yell at me if I try to do something that would destructively affect my project. It doesn’t care where you save your files, and really helps share work that can be shared across projects, like templates, brushes, pre-canned text, etc. When done, it can package my entire project and include all files, all versions, all everything… into one location; I can then burn that to DVD I assume and save it for later. We need this kind of software for *everything*. Tie it into a good solid GTD implementation and you’ve got yourself a production powerhouse. Take a look for yourself, check out the guided tour. These guys just re-wrote a chapter in the book of productivity, and solved a major problem. If you don’t think this is amazing then you’ve never experienced the pain of creating a multilayered document pulling images, and text from different sources; consider yourself lucky and go play outside instead. |
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