Will and Beyond - Posts tagged technology

07/02/10 @ 1:13AM EST
posted by will

Despite the fact I don't have a jetpack yet, recent developments give me hope.

The only downside to this is that every Star Wars nerd (myself proudly included) will buy one of these, and the geek:normal person ratio will drop rapidly as we all accidentally kill ourselves.

[Comments: 1][Tags: technology]

If you Cancel my Contention

01/06/10 @ 11:39AM EST
posted by will

Translation Party! This can be pretty entertaining; if you put a sentence into TranslationParty.com, it will translate something into Japanese using Google, then back into English, and will keep going back and forth until it equilibrates, in that it starts translating the same thing back and forth.

Here's an example of what it looks like, minus the Japanese:

i am wondering when this will equilibrate
I wonder if I'm a counterbalance
Whether I will cancel my
Cancel my contention that if
If you cancel my contention

translate

It's a simple yet brilliant idea. Can you come up with any fun ones? I copy and pasted the list of books I read in January, and took out the others, somehow ending up with: "On the test, Teiruzuobubado Beetle Aironokiddo, Kyamerukurabu, the researchers first: Raifurojabekon"

Edit:
Clearly need one with bacon.
But the winner is Katelyn.

I wish that I could
Have a three-line one for here
Tried, but way too hard

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0][Tags: technology]

Dooblet

06/16/09 @ 3:13PM EST
posted by will

dooblet The best replacement for biology is chemistry.
The best replacement for chemistry is physics.^[1]
The best replacement for physics is engineering.

I first learned about Dooblet from an article by David Bradley, the science writer behind ScienceBase. Based on Google results, it provides alternatives. I can't think of many ways this can be useful, but it's fun.

Not all of the results make as much sense as the ones above, for instance:
The best replacement for fun is chow mein.^[2]

[Comments: 3][Tags: technology]

Superpowered Wind

03/29/09 @ 4:44PM EST
posted by will

solar wind

Solar wind has the potential to devastate our power grid, leaving us in the dark ages for quite some time. Bursts of solar wind can cause coronal mass ejections, which is a phenomena you can read up on a bit on Wikipedia. How would this affect us? New Scientist explains it pretty well:

"The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity."

Flickr Galleries

02/26/09 @ 12:02AM EST
posted by will

I mentioned before that I would be switching over to Flickr for my photos. So far, in my photo-focused posts, I've just been posting highlight photos, then linking over to the appropriate Flickr set. It works, but it's not a perfect solution.

Today on Digg, I stumbled upon a post from Ennui Design about FlickrScrollr. You just input a Flickr RSS feed, and it will display a gallery of photos in a really sleek way. And you can click on them to open up a Javascript lightbox to browse through them all.

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Obama and the CTO

01/03/09 @ 4:28AM EST
posted by richard

The new position President-elect Obama is adding to the White House is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). I love that we now have a President who embraces technology and doesn't think that the Internet is a series of tubes.

Seriously though, the CTO of the United States is going to be a big deal as they will in charge of a mulititude of issues from the growth of technology, to keeping the internet network neutral. You can check out this list of what people think are the most important issues the CTO will confront upon taking this position.

Who is the lucky technological genius that will taking this position? We don't know as of yet, and Obama has been pretty quiet about the CTO since he announced its addition in October. One article shares rumors of possible candidates, ranging from Google's Vint Cerf to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer.

So I ask you this question. Who would you pick to be the CTO of the United States? What single person do you think is the most technological-savvy and business-savvy that would be able to handle all things relating to technology all throughout the United States? And no voting for Will, cause that's cheating.

Sorry for the lack of pictures and such. The internet here in Cairo is pretty slow and I'm going to run off to see the Pyramids today, far away from any technology.

Yay technology!
Please pick a good CTO
Barack Obama

[Comments: 0][Tags: politics, technology]

Airports without Wi-fi

12/23/08 @ 3:13AM EST
posted by will

Airports without free Wi-fi anger me. More so than most other annoying aspects of travel. I can deal with delays, they're (arguably) unavoidable. Overpriced airport food is understandable, they are running a monopoly. Jerry Seinfeld has a great bit about airports being they're own nation and charging exhorbatant prices for 'rare' tuna sandwiches. Unhelpful customer service agents are understandable, it's a miserable job, they have every right to hate it and take it out on us.

Making me pay $8 for a day (which usually means 2-3 hours) of Wi-fi is just absurd. However, this is along the same lines as the overpriced food, in that there's nothing we can do about it. I refuse to pay it though, as I sit here drinking my $6 smoothie. (That's actually not overpriced...) In the past, I have grudgingly shelled out the cash, but I refuse to give in.

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Inauguration Day and Change.gov

11/15/08 @ 2:52PM EST
posted by will

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Now that I'm living in DC, I would really like to go to the Capitol for Inauguration Day. I looked into how it works, and apparently they give out tickets (250,000), and if you don't get a ticket, you can go, but you'll be behind about 250k people.

Brain Power

11/11/08 @ 11:27PM EST
posted by richard

"People who are completely paralyzed due to illness or trauma are getting help communicating with a new technology that connects their brains to a computer." -CBS Video

Watch CBS Videos Online

That's the little snippet that comes with the video posted above. I know the video is about thirteen minutes long but trust me, it's worth it if you have any interest in new technology.

For those who want a brief synopsis though, the video highlights a brain reading technology that allows people with physical disabilities to share their thoughts. Lou Gehrig's disease, for example, eventually stops the function of all your muscles, while your brain can still function at normal level until you eventually pass away. So this technology is helpful to those people who can no longer write or speak.

The way the technology works is that you put a sensor swim cap thingy on your head and you think out words letter by letter. A computer program can read the letters you are thinking and places it on the screen on a text document. The sixty minutes interview guy tried it himself and was shocked to see that the program was accurate 100% of the time.

You might be thinking that this technology will allow people to read your thoughts. The creators of the technology say it isn't possible with this current technology since you need to voluntarily participate in order for it to work. However, I think this brain reading technology does bring us one step closer to that full on mind-reading.

The scary part of the video is that another person actually volunteered to have a chip installed into her brain that allows a computer to read her thoughts from the inside. In order for it to register, doctors attach a chord to her head, "entering the matrix" style. That's just creepy. It might also mean that we're turning into cyborgs.

So what do you think? Is this technology amazing or scary?

Please don't read my mind
It's confusing anyway
I'm a bit spacey

[Comments: 2][Tags: technology]

Virus Infection

10/29/08 @ 9:29PM EST
posted by will

I forget when exactly it happened, but at some point this weekend, when I tried to turn on my lab computer, it would hang at the desktop splash screen, and nothing including explorer.exe would load. I could get it into safe mode, and every once in a while I could get it to startup normally, but it would feel like trying to run Vista on a 486 with 32MB RAM.

Symantec didn't pick up anything, nor did McAfee Stinger. For kicks, I decided to try ClamWinPortable, which is a PortableApp. One day I'll give them their own post, because they're fantastic. I couldn't get internet access, so I took my flash drive downstairs and updated the definitions.

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