Category : nerds

Ingrid Newkirk, founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals India, is going to be very busy after she’s dead.

A new kind of search engine is coming to the web. In May, scientist Stephen Wolfram will launch Wolfram Alpha, a search engine that promises to actually answer your questions. For example, when you ask Google a question, the search engine answers with links that give you answers to your question. But when you pose a question to Wolfram, it will actually compute the answer. One simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.

Some nerds at MIT have developed a wearable computer system that projects Internet data onto any surface. Pattie Maes of the lab’s Fluid Interfaces group says the device hopes to create a new digital sixth sense for humans.

5p34k 133t? 534r(|-| \/\/17|-| 600673.com.

A group of Americans are taught to fly by some Norwegians who jump from the highest cliffs in the world. It’s like a dream.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

A Twelve year-old boy has solved the earth’s energy crisis. William Yuan, a seventh-grader from Beaverton, Oregon, has developed a new 3D solar cell which provides 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells. Yuan’s design increases the efficiency of electron movement through carbon nanotubes and enables light absorption from visible to ultraviolet light. He was awarded a $25k scholarship from the Davidson Institute and got on local Portland TV.

The world’s silliiest sport might be Cycle Ball, or Rad Ball as it’s called where this goofy-assed sport is most popular.

Yo slacker, if you can’t get away with cracking open a book at your desk, but still want to slack off and read at work, then try readatwork.com where several public domain classics are readable in a convincing XP-looking faux Powerpoint presentation.

As the site says, if you’re looking for a super cool watch, then you’ve just found the only place to buy one. At least the only place online in Engrish. Indeed, most of the watches at Tokyo Flash are super cool, though some of the watches, like the JLr7, are a little heavier on form than function. There are 12 lights for the hour, 3 for “quarter past”, “half past” & “quarter to” and 14 lights for the times in between. There are also 3 other lights which show the seconds ticking by. Yeah not that easy to tell the time at glance.

German digital media artist Markus Kison has come up with a VanityRing that displays the number of Google hits your name returns. Each night you can place it in a docking station to refresh your hits.

Here’s a network diagram which maps the iterations of the phrase “___is the new___” from various sources in 2005.

Robert Wood and his research team at Harvard have created some amazing little robot flies which can take off using tiny little 0.3mg wings.

Wood grain shoes from Medium and font foundry House Industries.

A 17 year-old Michigan high school student created a nuclear fusion device in his parent’s garage. The reactor, which took two years and 1,000 hours to research to build, uses deuterium gas and about 40,000 volts of electricity.

This is going to change the way we interact with machines from now on, proclaims NYU research scientist Jeff Han. He’s been working on a new touch-driven computer screen that does away with the mouse and keyboard and lets you control the screen by touching it at mulitple points. The only way to explain it is to see it. Or you can read more at Jeff Han’s site.

Chilly winter nights I’m always rocking a gem sweater. More from Leslie Hall and the LYs.