Unsought Input

What is Twitter? Well it’s blogging for people with ADHD. Updating your blog daily with painstaking detail of your every action not good enough, wish you could update in real time while your doing it as well as alert all of your friends simultaneously then Twitter is for you. All you have to do is go to twitter.com to sign up for a free account.

Once you’ve signed up you can set up your phone and instant messenger client to receive updates as well. It works like this you can log on to twitter and update your blog from there, or you can use your IM client or most importantly you can update your twitter blog from your phone.

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Yuki Taro, the Japanese sidewalk snow plow.  Think Roomba for snow covered sidewalks.  The basic idea here is that a very cute robot runs itself with GPS and plows up snow.  This snow it then turns into bricks that you can do anything with.  As long as they don’t melt.  The article I linked to says it was invented by kids but it was not.  The Japanese are just suckers for anything that is super cute and useful.  The name basically means “snow boy”, in case you were wondering.

~FBI gets their wire tap phone service disconnected.  I am not sure if there is anyone out there who hadn’t heard of this massive failure but I couldn’t let it get away with not being mentioned on this site.   Ha!  No free rides for you, FBI.  There are a few quotes that really sum this up.  “More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows.” More than half?  So, about 445 bills or so were unpaid?  Very interesting.

And one other quote worth mentioning, “We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence”.  NO! I never would have guessed that not paying your bills and having your services shut off could affect your ability to spy on people without a warrant.  A final note on this topic is that they are trying to pin the blame on a woman who stole some money from them.  So, you are telling me that one woman was the sole person responsible to pay every phone bill for the FBI? Hmm, maybe the FBI needs to consider implementing a checks and balance system.

~Burning coal for electricity creates a byproduct that is more radioactive than nuclear waste.  At least it is according to a new article in Scientific America.  It actually says that the ash created from burning the coal that is released into the air is up to 100 times more radioactive then nuclear waste.  I mean, with coal there is never a chance of a nuclear meltdown but maybe it really is time to move away from our dependency on coal.  I mean, we could live with acid rain, greenhouse gas emissions and the occasional trapped miners or unstoppable underground coal fires.  But now, with all of these things, please let’s just realize when to call it a draw.  In the defense of coal, the uranium content can change due to where the coal was mined, making some less radioactive then others.  But in the overall scheme of things, does it really matter?

Hope you enjoyed.  Please comment below.

Recently I read an article over at Thedailygreen.com where I read that China is putting a nationwide ban on free use of plastic bags.  It is said that this will reduce the country’s dependency on oil while helping them to cut their emissions down just in time for planning and executing the Beijing Olympics.  This is a good thing, even if it is being done for the wrong reasons.  I am not saying that it is, but it does seem suspicious that it’s being pushed into place just in time for the Olympics, doesn’t it?  I mean, China wants to set a good example.  The government wants to show the world it can change. And I say, good for you.  I can only hope that America’s need to change would spur such a difference here at home.

Not only is China cutting back on the amount of oil they use (37 million barrels of crude oil on plastic bag production every year), they will be cutting back on the processing and production pollution made while making the bags, and on the overall pollution of their landscape and landfills after the bags have been used.  There will still be plastic bags for sale but they will not be given freely as they currently are now.  The idea is to make people bring their own reusable shopping bags each time they shop.

I think this sounds feasible here in the States.  I think something similar is definitely what we need.  A good old kick in the pants to get people to be slightly less environmentally selfish and to get our nation to start actually acting like they care what they are doing to the planet we live on.  I mean, I think everyone is aware that there is a problem.  But how long can we go on ignoring the signs?  Something needs to be done and this could be something that would not be that hard for people to adjust to and very very good for the environment.

Some retailers have already started selling reusable bags in the States, major chains like Walmart and Giant Eagle.  Here is a little info about Walmart’s bags from sustainableisgood.com:

The new Wal-Mart shopping bags are made from a fabric containing rPET.  The bags are made from 85% recycled content and hold more than twice the amount of an average plastic bag.  The bags will sell for $1 and be located near checkout aisles in Wal-Mart stores.  Wal-Mart will also take the bags back at the end of their life-span for recycling.

I am not trying to preach here.  I just think that most people are not going to do something like this on their own.  That if there were laws put in place that put a heavy tax (for example an environmental tax where the money went into environmental sustainability programs/research) on things that are wasteful (insert the plastic bag here) that people would start to actually consider their impact on the planet.  And if not, they would still be forced to either be environmentally friendly in a small way or pay a tax for the environment.

I am sure there are all sorts of negative comments people can make about this, that it’s not fair for the government to force this on people and no new taxes  and blah blah blah but we need to face reality.  And preferably sometime soon.

Sci-Fi movies invariably have cool, futuristic gadgets that are much more interesting than silly things like characters and plot. Luckily, the future is getting closer all the time. Although we don’t have flying cars, we do have four move technologies that will make you feel like you’re living in the future.

1. Tech: Kaneda’s electric motorcycle

Movie: Akira

Akira opens with a battle between two motorcycle gangs in Neo-Tokyo in the year 2019. The bikes are fast, dangerous, and apparently electric.

Leave it to the Japanese to make geeky future tech happen. This version isn’t quite as fast or mean looking, but paint it red and throw on some decals and the clowns won’t mess with you.

Tech we really want: SOL

Although Tetsuou eventually makes mincemeat of the The Satellite Orbiting Laser, it’s the only thing in the whole move that was able to hurt him. Plus, how cool would it been to be able to rain down laser on command? Think of all the popcorn you could make!

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A couple of weeks ago the esteemed Mr. Wallz mentioned that Radiohead was giving their next album away for free – sort of. The deal is that you can pay any amount you want for the MP3 version, from $0 on up. They are not going through iTunes or Amazon or anyone else and are selling direct from the album’s website.

I went, I bought, I listened. The verdict? Good album, incredibly terrible website. Seriously, the site looks and acts like something that crawled from the depths of 1998, escaping some doomed graphic artist’s college portfolio and wreaking havok on unsuspecting downloaders everywhere.

Here’s a screenshot of the registration screen. Too many fields, and too many required fields. Do they really need my mobile phone number?

Yes, the entire web site looks like that. It’s like someone asked their 4-year old to draw a rainbow in Microsoft Paint and then saved and re-saved it as a jpeg 100 times.

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