Marshall Brain's Blog

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Student Scientist Stumbles Across Catnip as Bug Repellent

Cassie Wagner is a 13-year-old middle school student.

From the article:

"I wanted to put catnip in the toy because that's what cats like," Cassie said. "My mom said no, so I started researching catnip."

What she found was that the essential oil in catnip, an organic herb, was believed to repel insects. Cassie didn't find any research backing up the claim and she never saw catnip bug spray on store shelves, so she decided to test the claim herself.... Two years and several trips to an entomology lab at the University of Florida later, Cassie's research is paying off.

Not only has her work netted her thousands of dollars in scholarships from two regional science awards, but Cassie hopes it can help her obtain a patent for her idea and give people another way to keep mosquitoes away.

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Cluttered desks make workers ill

From the article:

Researchers at NEC-Mitsubishi say the nation's office workers are being hit by "Irritable Desk Syndrome".

They say long working hours, cluttered desks and poor posture are making many people ill.

Of course, if a cluttered desk can cause illness, I should have been dead years ago.

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baltimoresun.com - 'Scooby-Doo 2' coasts to No. 1

From the article:

Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed took in $30.7 million in its opening weekend, good enough for an easy No. 1 finish.

What is this telling us?

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Fire Ant Attacks Up in Nursing Homes

From the article:

"South American fire ants are becoming an increasing danger for nursing home residents, as the aggressive non-native pests spread throughout the country and the U.S. population ages, according to University of Mississippi researchers.

Scientists have documented at least six attacks in nursing homes and as many other attacks in private residences, apartments and hotels over the last decade"

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U.N. Warns About Ocean 'Dead Zones'

From the article:

So-called "dead zones," oxygen-starved areas of the world's oceans that are devoid of fish, top the list of emerging environmental challenges, the United Nations Environment Program warned Monday in its global overview.

The spreading zones have doubled over the last decade and pose as big a threat to fish stocks as overfishing, UNEP said its Global Environment Outlook Year Book 2003, released at the opening of the agency's 8th summit for the world's environment ministers.

There is a page in this month's Wired magazine that contains three fascinating gadgets. They are pricey but interesting. They are:

• The Kaleidascape DVD server. It rips DVDs and stores them on an internal hard drive. You can then play the DVDs wirelessly by installing receivers at each video display in your house. The server and one player cost $27,000, and each additional player is $4,000.
  
  If you only need to drive one screen, it seems like you could get almost all of the functionality with a PC, a copy of DVD Decryper or similar, a player, and a wireless video transmitter for $99 or so.
  
  
• The Data Bahn. It's an antenna that you carry with you in the car, and when you park you stick it on the roof of the car to get a satellite signal. It gives you T1-line data speeds no matter where you are. It's $4,000, plus a $80/month fee.
  
  It seems like you could carry a DirectTV antenna with you and sign up for their DirectWay data service and do the same thing. It only costs $600 for the equipment and $60/month for the service (or you can pay $99 down and $99/month).
  
  
• The OQO Ultra Personal Computer. The cool part is the fact that it is a complete Windows XP PC in a 14-ounce package. It has a 1-Ghz transmeta processor, 256 Mbytes of RAM and a 20 GB hard disk. This computer was originally announced 2 years ago, and was much cooler then. The hoped-for release date is Fall 2004 for $2,000.
  
  It seems like you could get approximately the same thing in the Compaq TC1000. It too has a Transmeta processor running at 1-Ghz, 256 MB of RAM and a 30 GB hard disk. It's a bit bigger, but it has a very nice full-screen LCD. It's also a Tablet PC, meaning you can write on the screen. If you go to eBay you can regularly find them for about $1,000.

It's interesting how much less expensive things can be if you are willing to improvise a little.

The weekend project here at the Brain household was the construction of a swing set for the kids. If you are a parent, then you have probably been through at least one large construction project like this and can completely sympathize.

When we bought the thing (which came in four huge boxes and weighed at least 500 pounds), the person who helped us load it into the truck said, "Oh, it's easy -- my neighbor put their's together in less than two hours!" He certainly made it sound simple.

We started the project by laying all the parts out in the backyard:


Saturday morning...

That alone took about an hour. After 15 hours of actual construction time, I stopped counting...

One of the more interesting things we did on this project was that we videotaped the whole thing. The video camera has one of these "time lapse" modes, so the 15+ hour construction process got compressed into just a half hour or so of tape. Click here to see a little snippet. (this snippet actually was not shot with the camera's time lapse mode, as will be explained in a moment...)

There are three things I noticed as I was building this swing set:

1. It is time to create gadgets that talk to you. I've mentioned this once before. Here's why. To use the time lapse mode on the video camera, you have to go into a menu and play with some settings, and then turn the time lapse feature on. If you turn the camera off (because you are eating lunch, say) then, when you turn the camera back on, it forgets all about time lapse recording and goes back to its "normal mode". Wouldn't it be nice if, when you turn the camera back on, it said, "Hey, an hour ago you were doing time lapse mode -- would you like me to keep doing that or go back to my normal mode?" Then you could answer yes or no and the camera would set itself appropriately. Or it could ask the question in the viewfinder and then you could push a button to answer yes or no. A gadget like a video camera has 150 settings, and it would be nice if the camera helped out with them.
   
   
2. There has been a transformation in the construction field brought on by the advent of the electric-screwdriver/battery-powered-drill. In assembling this wooden playset, there was not a single nail. Instead, you screw and ratchet the entire thing together. There must have been at least 250,000 screws in this kit. It would have driven you absolutely insane to do all those screws by hand. That is why people once used nails. You could hammer in nails quickly. Now, because of the electric screwdriver, it is actually quicker to screw everything together. The nice side-benefit of screws is that it is easier to take things apart when you make a mistake.
   
   
3. Is it possible to have "future gadget envy?" You may have experienced "gadget envy" -- you see a friend using some new gadget and you decide that you have to get one yourself. Gadget Envy drives the sale of everything from big plasma screens to camera phones. "Future Gadget Envy" occurs when you know that there is going to be a new gadget available in the near future, but you want it to be here today. In my case, future gadget envy occurs because I have been writing so much about robots. I can imagine having a robot that accesses the Internet wirelessly, downloads the instructions and then builds the whole playset for me in 25 minutes. I get that same feeling now whenever I peel a potato, load the dishwasher or pick up the playroom. Only about 15 years to go...

It did finally get done:

Sunday evening

And the kids love it!

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Pushing the Buy

You've probably see the images of the human brain that show how different parts of the brain "light up" when thinking about certain kinds of things. The headline that normally accompanies something like that is, "Scientists discover portion of the brain associated with love," or "scientists discover that seizures start in the habeus corpus," or whatever.

Now there is a new group that is funding the research. According to the article:

Sellers have always expended a great deal of time and energy trying to figure out what potential buyers really think (as opposed to what they say when you ask them). Now, using powerful brain-scan technology, they can do so scientifically. Ford of Europe uses such "neuromarketing" techniques to better understand how consumers make emotional connections with their brands. DaimlerChrysler has funded several research projects at the University of Ulm in Germany, using brain-imaging technology to decode which purchasing choices go into buying a car. Firms like Oxford-based Neurosense have sprung up to make neuromarketing a bona fide business tool.

The part that is worrying about this is: Who knows what they will discover? For example, what if they discover some combination of words and phrases that, when delivered in the proper sequence, causes your brain to NEED a Ronco Vegamatic? Or a Pontiac Aztek?

You may recall last week's article entitled A Revolutionary Mission to Mars. This article proposed that NASA send only the disembodied brains of astronauts -- rather than their entire bodies -- to Mars. This approach offers many advantages, so many in fact that body-free space travel is inevitable. It is likely to be far too expensive and dangerous to ever send humans to Mars if their bodies have to go along for the ride. See the article for details.

One of the big benefits of the moon missions of the 20th century was all of the new technology that NASA spun off. The big spin-off from the Mars missions will be the technology for supporting and interfacing to disembodied brains.

The article generated a lot of feedback, most of it claiming that: A) the idea is disgusting, so B) no one would ever let their brain and body be separated, and thus C) it will never happen.

I'm not so sure. Here's why: There are millions people today who would immediately separate their brains from their bodies if they had the chance.

The most obvious group who would willingly choose this option are people with terminal diseases such as inoperable cancer. A person in this situation is trapped by a body that no longer serves its purpose. Many people with terminal illnesses would push the eject button and go body-free the instant they had the opportunity. Another obvious group are people whose bodies are aging very badly while their minds remain sharp. Here too the body is a trap, and releasing the brain from the body solves the problem.

Lots of other people would go this route. Think about the emphasis that humans place on physical beauty. This article points out that 8.7 million Americans opted for plastic surgery in 2003. And this post points out that we are now seeing so many images of artificial, "perfect" people in the media that it is becoming impossible for "real" people to live up to their standards. In addition, many people are born with genes that prevent them from ever being truly "physically beautiful", no matter how hard a plastic surgeon tries.

All of this emphasis on appearance would make disembodied brains a natural path for those seeking permanent beauty. A disembodied brain would live almost exclusively in virtual space, and would therefore be able to choose any body and face he/she wants, with the option to change appearance at a moment's notice (see Manna for some ideas on where this leads).

What will therefore happen is that we will have the virtual, computer-generated space where all of these disembodied brains "live". Everyone in this virtual space will be able to look any way he or she chooses. In addition, virtual space is infinite, and infinitely moldable. It will grow and improve daily. Just look at the virtual worlds being created for gaming today. Now imagine how rich and varied those environments will be in 20 or 30 years.

One possible scenario that is easy to imagine looks like this: the virtual space inhabited by body-free people will be getting bigger and better every day. Inhabitants will be able to swim under virtual oceans, float weightless in virtual space ships, fly freely in virtual skies, run through beautiful virtual meadows free of pollen, ski on virtual mountain ranges without feeling cold, etc. The possibilities for virtual dating and porn in this virtual universe boggle the mind. And everyone will be beautiful. People living outside this virtual realm will feel left out, and will therefore opt in to a body-free life because virtual space will be better than real space. It will be analogous to the process that drove people off the farms and into the cities.

Eventually, the majority of people will live as disembodied brains, at least in the latter parts of their lives as their bodies fail them. This transition strikes me as inevitable, as soon as the technology is available to live the body-free lifestyle.

NASA should therefore begin research on disembodied brain technology immediately.

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I don't know why this is so exciting to me, but there is now such a thing as transparent concrete! It is made by mixing fiber optics in with the concrete when it is poured.

Can transparent aluminum be that far away?

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Do you ever get that feeling that you may be living in a parallel universe? That the world around you is one manifestation of earth, and there may be other manifestations that co-exist without your knowledge of them? Two articles this week left me with that feeling...

The first is a recent article from Wired called Dogging Craze Has Brits in Heat. The opening paragraph pretty much says it all: "Giving new meaning to the term 'flash mob,' the British have invented a new sex craze called 'dogging' that mixes sex, exhibitionism, mobs and the Internet. Dogging combines technology with swinging, cruising and voyeurism. To wit: Crowds big and small watch exhibitionist couples who've met on the Net have sex in cars, and sometimes join in." There's really not that much more to say -- this apparently is a growing "trend", and the article is full of details.

The second article is just as easy to understand right from the title: teens swap nude photos of themselves on Web. It's pretty easy to do:

1. Take the family's digital camera
2. Snap a nude picture of yourself
3. Mail it to your friends

What this trend needs is a good, catchy name. Perhaps, "Personal Porn." Or, "My Porn." The merge of this trend and the previous trend with video phones would be... Well, it's pretty easy to imagine.

Today's enterprising teenager would simply archive the nude photos that arrive via email and wait for any of his/her classmates to become moderately successful in the years to come. "Remember that nude photo you sent me back in middle school?"

Of course by then, maybe it won't matter...

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Why Britain's disappearing butterflies may be early victims of the sixth mass extinction

From the article:

A milestone study of British birds, butterflies and wild flowers has revealed the strongest evidence yet that we are on the verge of a mass extinction of global wildlife - the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth.

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This is actually a breaking news story today: New, more dangerous Net viruses unleashed

From the article:

The new and more dangerous variations of the Bagle virus -- first discovered in January -- have been unleashed with a new twist: users no longer have to open an accompanying attachment to get the virus.

Anti-virus experts say five new variants of the Bagle can defeat and disable security programs and anti-virus programs, rendering the machine vulnerable to cyberspace piracy.

The article recommends that you make sure the operating system has all current patches and that your virus-checking code is up to date.

There is tremendous excitement about a manned mission to Mars right now, but tremendous concerns about costs and safety.

This article proposes a very different way to think about a manned mission that will greatly reduce cost -- the proposal sounds far-fetched until you read the article.

See A Revolutionary Mission Plan for Mars for details.

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BYU Professor Trying to Make Office a Quieter Place

This BYU professor noticed how noisy the fans for his computer were in his office, so he is working on noise-cancelling technology to make them silent. According to the article:

Their noise-control unit consists of four tiny loudspeakers and microphones built into the case around a fan.

The four microphones measure the fan's noises and signal a tiny microprocessor that drives the speakers, which make sound waves precisely canceling out the sound waves of the rotating fan blades. From the speakers come a sound pressure inverse to the pressure made by the fan, Sommerfeldt said.

Once it's perfected, the fan should be completely silent.

The thought of a completely silent microwave oven is intriguing.

Now we need the same thing for vacuum cleaners, circular saws and blenders...

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Your car is watching you:

From the article:

In the most recent case, 26-year-old Eric Gauthier of Montreal was convicted on two counts of dangerous driving in an accident that killed a 20-year-old man, largely on the basis of five seconds of recorded data in the chip that controlled the air bag in Mr. Gauthier's car.

Those chips, called "event data recorders," or EDRs, are becoming more common in Canadian vehicles. General Motors has installed them in all its cars since 1999, and Ford has been using them since 2000.

Originally intended to protect car-makers from lawsuits over the proper deployment of air bags, the five seconds of information they preserve -- on a car's speed and the positions of the brake and gas pedals, for example -- are now being used in criminal trials and to settle insurance claims.

Now you have to worry about your car tattling on you...

First, a side note. I had originally read this article here:

Search Beyond Google

However, it is no longer available there -- you have to pay for a subscription if you want to read it now. The same article is still available here:

Search Beyond Google (minus the illustrations)

How does that help anything?

The thing that is interesting about the article is its look "behind the scenes" at how search engines perform some of their tricks, and how the idea of "search" will be changing in the very near future. For example:

Take Microsoft Research's AskMSR program, which Brill and his colleagues have been testing on Microsoft's internal network for more than a year. At its core is a simple search box where users can enter questions such as "Who killed Abraham Lincoln?" and, instead of getting back a list of sites that may have the information they seek, receive a plain answer: "John Wilkes Booth." The software relies not on any advanced artificial-intelligence algorithm but rather on two surprisingly simple tricks.

First, it uses language rules learned from a large database of sample sentences to rewrite the search phrase so that it resembles possible answers: for example, "__ killed Abraham Lincoln" or "Abraham Lincoln was killed by __." Those text strings are then used as the queries in a sequence of standard keyword-based Web searches. If the searches produce an exact match, the program is done, and it presents that answer to the user.

In many cases, though, the program won't find an exact match, but only oblique variations on the text strings, such as "John Wilkes Booth's violent deed at the Ford Theater ended Lincoln's second term before it had started." That's okay, too. As its second trick, AskMSR reasons that if "Booth" frequently appears in the same sentence as "Lincoln," there must be an important relationship between them-which allows it to posit an answer, even if it's not 100 percent confident.

"We are tapping into the redundancy of the Web," explains Brill. "If you have a lot of places where you are somewhat certain that you have found the answer, the redundancy makes it more certain." As the Web grows, so will its redundancy, making AskMSR ever more powerful, Brill reasons. While plans for AskMSR aren't definite, Brill believes the code will see the light of day, perhaps as part of a future Microsoft search engine.

It's an interesting article.

I'm still looking for a way to solve this simple search problem: "How Many _____ Are There." These are really simple questions, like, "How many teenagers are there in the United States?" or "How many cars did Ford make last year?" If you type either of those questions into Google, you get gibberish back. So you end up trying to find obtuse ways to ferret out the answer. "Number teens million" might be a typical attempt. And forget it if you want to know the answer for 1982. "How much" questions can be just as bad. Easy solutions for simple questions like that would be great.

Man nets $800,000 through returned merchandise scheme

From the article:

A Connecticut man was charged with amassing $800,000 from retailers in 20 states through a returned merchandise scheme, authorities said.

Jeffrey Hlinak would buy an item at a department store, buy numerous copies of the same product at a discount store, doctor the department store receipts and then collect higher-priced refunds on the items he bought at the discount stores, authorities said.

This means that the "price spread" must be wide enough between discounters and department stores that Hlinak could make that much money -- $800,000 is a lot of money to make.

If Hlinak had been doing this with foreign currencies or stocks, it would be called arbitrage, defined in the dictionary as, "The purchase of securities on one market for immediate resale on another market in order to profit from a price discrepancy." It's completely legal there. Apparently arbitrage with consumer products is not appreciated in the same way it is in the financial markets.

Of course, if the Wholesale price of every item was visible, most of this price spread would evaporate. Consumers would be able to pick up an item and see the wholesale price of it right on the label. Then they could see the spread between the wholesale and retail price instantly, and avoid items where the retail price is a rip off. It is amazing to me that, in this day and age, we as consumers allow the wholesale price to remain hidden. Why not expose it for all to see?

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PopSci is running an interesting article this month that describes how to make your own LCD picture frame to display your digital photos. Basically you take an off-the-shelf LCD monitor, add an inexpensive motherboard/power supply/hard drive, load Linux on the HD, copy all your digital photos to the HD and let it display a slide show continuously. In other words, you build a complete Linux PC for about $500 or $600 and use it to display pictures. A little pricey, but interesting.

The part that is most intriguing to me is the level of the project. It used to be that a do-it-yourself project in PopSci or PopMech involved building a lamp, or making a side table. Now it involves building an entire PC...

On Slashdot it was pointed out that mini-itx.com has a very similar article using a mini ITX motherboard. Another article shows how to cannibalize an old laptop (more details). Several people suggested simply buying an older, used laptop on eBay and dedicating it to the task -- no frame, no mat, just fold back the display and hang it on the wall. That way you get the display, processor, hard disk and OS all in one ready-to-go package, and you probably only have to pay about $100 for it if you shop carefully.

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The article is entitled Virginity pledgers' STDs not reduced. The basic message is that we have a group of teens in America who have publicly pledged to remain virgins until marriage. Yet they get sexually transmitted diseases at the same rate as teens who don't make the pledge. The reason?

''It's difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you're not going to have sex,'' said Peter Bearman, chairman of Columbia University's sociology department, who coauthored the study with Hannah Bruckner of Yale University.

The teens who pledge to abstain fail to bring condoms when they go on a date, so they get lots of STDs when they end up having sex anyway.

That's not the unbelievable part, however. That actually makes sense once you think about it. The unbelievable part is this:

The study also found that 99 percent of nonpledgers and 88 percent of pledgers have sex before marriage.

If that is true, then this whole "abstinence" thing we are trying to drive into schools has a very long, uphill battle. Can you think of ANY other activity (besides breathing) that has a participation rate of 99 percent?

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An article in Time magazine entitled Trains in Vain talks about a new form of terrorism -- blackmail terrorism. From the article:

"The hitherto unknown group [named AZF] has threatened to bomb France's railroads unless the government forks over a hefty ransom.

Beginning in December, AZF sent the President and Interior Ministry letters grousing about the state of French society and warning that it had planted bombs along the nation's rail lines and at two other unidentified vulnerable targets. Officials say they were instructed to communicate with the group via personal ads in a newspaper, using the code name 'Big Wolf' for AZF and 'Suzy' for the ministry. A day after officials posted one such ad, they received the GPS coordinates of a sophisticated bomb that had been planted along a line in central France, which ballistics experts detonated."

The basic message is: "Pay us $5 million or we will blow up your train system."

This kind of stuff from terrorists is one reason why there is so much pressure to develop robotic police and security systems as quickly as possible. If there can be robotic sentries gaurding remote rail lines, pipelines, powerlines, bridges, etc., many terrorist opportunities will be eliminated.

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Keyboards, phones 'dirtier than toilets'

From the article:

Keyboards, computer mice and telephone dials are more infested with microbes than toilet seats, according to United States researchers.

The University of Arizona study recommends that office workstations be regularly disinfected since they can on average contain 400 times as many germs as a toilet seat.

A friend of mine sent me this web video after seeing this post:

Seeds of Darkness

It is a Star Wars take-off. Several of the space battle scenes are absolutely amazing.

More films like it are available here. This one, like Pink Five, is pretty humorous.

One of the more interesting developments in the world of robotics this week is a new way of thinking about house construction. It is a complete paradigm shift. Instead of assembling the house out of bits and pieces (dimensional lumber, siding and sheetrock, for example), the house is "printed" using fast-setting concrete and a giant robotic arm. You can see some very nice animations that show how the process would work on this page, and comments are available here.

There are a number of good posts in Robotic Nation this week, covering things like small humanoid robots, exoskeletons, robotic baths (washing machines for humans), robotic security, robotic armies, etc.

This is a very interesting article that explains how money flows in Hollywood:

After 'Passion,' no need for Gibson to work again

Hitachi Pushes Hard Drive to 400GB

Here are the specs:

• Five platters
  
• Ten heads
  
• 8MB cache
  
• 4.17 millisecond average latency
  
• 61.7 gigabits per square inch

If that is not big enough and fast enough, how about a 2.5 terabyte RAM disk for $4.7 million? The idea is that you load the disk up with large databases so you can search them very quickly. From the article:

A RamSan 320 unit holds up to 64GB of RAM in a 3U rack unit. The US government order is housed in three full height rack units. There are over 320 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports and the aggregate I/O rate is 36Gbit/s. That is some serious hardware.

The article is entitled Cell Phone Vendors Ring Up Record Year. It says:

A record number of cell phones were sold last year by manufacturers, primarily due to people replacing their handsets with newer models and increased sales in emerging markets, market-research firm Gartner said.

Worldwide shipments totaled 520 million units in 2003, a 20.5% increase over 2002 sales, Gartner said. Sales were so good that manufacturers struggled to meet demand.

There are roughly 6 billion people on the planet -- this means that 1 out of every 11 people worldwide got a new cell phone handset last year. That's a lot of handsets...

Since half the people on the planet are subsisting on less than $1,000 per year, we can probably imagine that they aren't buying cell phones at the moment. So it is more like 1 out of every 5 people with any disposable income bought all those new handset last year. Imagine what the market for cell phones would look like if we could figure out a way to raise the standard of living of the poorest 3 billion people.

After seeing the engine animations from the previous post, a friend sent me a link to a big collection of flash animations. This one on earthquakes is particularly nice.

This is a nice page if you like engines: Animated Engines. Clean, simple animations.

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Insurer warns of global warming catastrophe

From the article:

The world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.

And:

The report comes as a growing number of policy experts warn that the environment is emerging as the security threat of the 21st century, eclipsing terrorism.

What would really help move this debate along is something like a massive flood in NYC or Washington DC caused by rising ocean levels, or something like that. That might be enough to get everyone's attention...

This article on Open Spectrum is fascinating and really changes your perspective on how radio spectrum works. From the article:

At first glance, the promise of Open Spectrum does sound like the stuff of science fiction. Being able to have millions of people simultaneously utilize their surrounding spectrum and each have 10Mbps, 100Mbs or even gigabits / second of bandwidth where in the past it was difficult to have enough spectrum for a handful of TV stations, scores of radio stations and a few cell phone carriers seems like an absurd dream. This is because our "common sense" understanding of radio spectrum capacity comes from our day-to-day experience with radio technologies that have been largely unchanged since the beginning of the last century.

The article is 5 pages long and well worth reading.

Scientist Claims Proof Of Afterlife is interesting. According to the article, "What happens after we die -- do we continue on or is this life the end? Many of us hope there is an afterlife, and now some Arizona scientists say they have proof through their afterlife experiments." The article goes on with statements like this, "Almost anyone who sees the data says there's something real here," and "When you look at the totality of the data from our laboratory, the simplest explanation is actually that survival of consciousness is real."

The article describes one experiment. A Medium (someone who can communicate with dead people) comes into the lab and does a reading on a typical person. Within seconds the medium is talking to dead relatives of that typical person. In particular, the dead mother is able to tell the medium that there is carrot cake and some peanuts in the house of the subject.

As I read this, I was left with three questions:

• If this is true, why don't these mediums immediately start contacting people who would have useful information to share? Let's be honest -- it is hard to get excited by peanuts and carrot cakes. Why not contact Albert Einstein? Surely, since his death several decades ago, he's come up with a couple of new theories. His death should have given him the time and perspective to really open things up in his thinking. Why not talk to Black Beard and find out where his treasure was buried?
  
  
• The ability to talk to the dead could revolutionize the American legal system. Dead people should now be able to give their side of the story in every murder case, and offer details to make conviction of the murderer easy. Now we should be able to know for sure whether OJ did it or not.
  
  
• I'd like to think that dead people would have some new "special abilities" and would be able to see into both the past and the future. That means that these mediums can ask about tomorrow's winning lottery numbers and make a killing.

It will be interesting to watch this story develop...

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Scientist says new treatments could let humans live for centuries

From the article:

Humans could live for hundreds of years as scientists develop treatments to "cure" old age like any other disease, a US researcher said on Thursday.

Michigan State University clinical professor of medicine Michael Fossel said researchers had already "rejuvenated" skin cells in the laboratory and the potential existed to expand the technolgy to turn back the entire ageing process.

The White House had predicted that 320,000 new jobs would be created in February. Instead, we got 21,000. What does it mean, and what should we do? Click here.

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So you've just emailed a copy of your Microsoft Word document out to a hundred people who need to see it. The document contained some confidential material in an early draft, but you deleted it. Now it turns out that the confidential material may still be in the document. This article describes one scenario:

Document shows SCO prepped lawsuit against BofA

According to the article:

A feature in the word-processing software tracks changes to documents, who made those changes, and when they were made. These notations typically are invisible to someone reading a Word document. But as some lawyers, businesspeople and politicians have learned the hard way, Word can also display so-called metadata in the document--including the original version and all subsequent changes. This information is available by viewing the document under "original showing markup" or "final showing markup."

It's a fascinating article, and something to think about before you release an actual Word document via email.

Microsoft Gadget Keeps Record of Your Life

Here is a set of links sent in by friends over the last several weeks:

• This is not nearly so good as the video by Bugatti... and it's about 20 years late... But it shows a very fast solution to a Rubik's Cube. The reason it is interesting is because it demonstrates the effect that music can have on even the simplest video. Turn the sound off and watch it again. Music makes a big difference!
  
  
• While on the subject of Rubik's cubes -- and totally coincidentally -- David has a Lego Mindstorms kit and we have been looking for new projects on the Internet. We came across this Rubik's Cube Robot. There is a huge crowd of creative people doing things with Mindstorms.
  
  
• RFID Tags in New US Notes Explode When You Try to Microwave Them -- The premise of this article is that the new $20 bills contain RFID tags that explode in the microwave. It probably is not RFID tags, but it is still interesting.
  
  
• 3G won't catch on 'because we can't lie' -- We've been hearing about video phones since the 1950s, we are just a year or two away from having them (and they'll be completely mobile to boot, integrated into our cell phones), and this article is proposing that half the people won't use them because a video phone will reveal that they are not where they say they are.
  
  
• Ford device intended to unclog roads -- Ford is experimenting with a new system to detect traffic jams and report them. Cars are equipped with computers that monitor position, speed, weather, road slipperiness, etc. and report the data back to central computers. The computers can then detect accidents, bottlenecks, bad weather, etc. and report it quickly. These are normal cars and trucks, and they gather the data automatically in the normal course of driving around.
  
  
• Chameleon Tire -- The rubber on this tire has been modified so that if it overheats it turns red. This would let you "see" underinflated tires easily.
  
  
• Hot-Headed Men May Be Risking Their Lives -- If you get angry a lot and you are a man, it has a measurable effect on your health (heart problems, strokes, etc.). But not if you are a woman.
  
  
• Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore? -- The SAT is adding a new written essay section, and changing the scoring so the high score is now 2400. Shakespeare and Hemmingway would not fare so well on the new test, but the Unabomber would.
  
  
• Earth sows its seeds in space (maybe)

This article is interesting because it is unusual: Killington Residents Endorse Plan To Join New Hampshire. Killington is a ski town in Vermont (I went skiing there several times in college). The town is 25 miles from New Hampshire, and it wants to become a New Hampshire town because that will reduce its taxes significantly.

This brings up a question. What if we made the concept of statehood virtual for everyone? In the same way that you can now choose any long distance carrier or power company, what if you could choose your state arbitrarily? For example, I physically live in North Carolina. But what if I would rather be a citizen of the state of Florida because it has low income taxes? Or perhaps I want to be a citizen of the state of Hawaii because it has better health care laws. Whatever. Each person would choose their state to best fit their lifestyle.

This is not as unusual as it might sound. Corporations, for example, can do exactly this. Many corporations from around the country are incorporated in the state of Delaware because they like the laws in Delaware.

If corporations can do it, why not individuals?

It is very interesting to think about the ramifications of this simple change in thinking. If people could randomly choose to be a citizen of any state regardless of their physical location, it would have vast effects on everything from education to taxation to property ownership. It would change congress and the senate. It would, in theory, allow completely new virtual states to arise. And so on. It's funny how big an effect such an ephemeral and largely arbitrary concept like statehood can have.

The first project is actually a series of remarkably small R/C helicopters hand-crafted by Alexander Van de Rostyne:




The other is an auxiliary battery pack for an iPod that extends its life by 10 hours. It is hand-crafted by Drew Perry:



Presumably you could apply the same approach to all sorts of other devices. (Although I'd be interested to see what airport security would make of a device like this...)

If you've ever considered taking up welding for some of your own DIY projects, here's a very nice introduction.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this page: Facts about Wealth that every American should know. It contains some fascinating stuff. For example:

• The [richest 1% of Americans] now own more than the bottom 90% [of Americans].
• The top 10% [of Americans] own 71% of all private wealth.
• Bill Gates alone has as much wealth as the bottom 40% of U.S. households.
• In the 22 years between 1976 and 1998, the share of the nation's private wealth held by the top 1% nearly doubled, going from 22% to 38%.
• In 1982 the wealthiest 400 individuals in the "Forbes 400" owned $92 billion. By 2000 their wealth increased to over $1.2 trillion.

For more examples, Click here.