things that are claimed as new but aint

for those who need privacy and security without electricity. read the comments, they are funny.

most of what i write today will be rehash of other blogs (not my own) sorry.

Hack a day has a great little item on how to play music from RFID tags. What i would like instead of dumping old commodore 64 music files to an RFID tag and then reading them back is a system that reads the raw data from RFID tags and uses it as random info for creating music. It would make an interesting experiment to see if different stores have different musical style. Would the RFID tags at walmart really make different music then the ones at target or just the same music in different order based on store layout and direction of walking. Same story on slashdot.

Remember Bill Nye the Science Guy? Well he's coming back. Even as a non-kid at the time, i liked his show.

Dangerous, nut-case, self destructive, stupid..... Muammar Gaffafi speaks out. But those were not the things he said, those are things I am saying about him. The frightening thing is he might, through his own prejudice and refusal to see the facts, be right about the two nation solution. It will likely not work well in the long run.

Another reason to get married, but only to someone happier than you are.

Now this one makes me laugh. It seems that what makes water splash is the air and gasses dissolved in it. The reason that makes me laugh is two-fold. One is that a number of months ago a bunch of researchers in Australia found that if you removed all gasses from water, it will mix perfectly well with oil. That should have been a clue that the water/gas mixture changes the nature of things. The other and bigger reason to laugh is that YEARS ago two physicists patented the idea of removing gas from water to make it not splash. They created something called smooth water, sold smooth water installation art setups to Disney for a fortune and went on to work on fire-fountains. Found a neat article on how to make your own fountain which had lots of helpful info on the creators, Mark W. Fuller & Allen Robinson of WET Labs/Design.

Remember Biology 101 or high school bio class? No, I am not asking about the cute girl in the third row, though the two of you would have been less worried if you had listened in class instead of making eyes at each other. Mendelian genetics, those silly little boxes.... well it turns out things may not be that simple after all. It seems that one particular plant that a fellow was playing with carries backup copies of old genes somewhere because the off spring of two genetically mutates plants was not mutated. Now here is where my memory gets me into trouble. I can clearly remember my college bio teacher (who looked like Dustin Hoffman in drag (think Tootsie) but was actually female, but none of that matters right now) saying to us that an experiment had been done with fruit flies that bred them to have no eyes, however after a few generations of no eyes, they reverted to normal. If thats the case then whatever mechanism did that is likely the same as the one working in the plants and that makes this a non-new discovery (did I mention that i never showed up for english class?).

Portable TV with video recording and playback/internal HD.

Add this to the list of robot kits I want to play with.

A neat article on how to extend the age limits on brain flexibility in youngsters. If I had to make a guess it works off the research that showed that human babies are as good at telling the difference between monkey faces as monkey babies.

A new advancement in Fuel Cell technology that should make fuel cell cars and equipment a little easier/cheaper to make/market/own.

EAT MORE BAMBOO SHOOTS, pretend your a swampland gorilla or panda bear.

Britian prepares for 750,000 bird flu cases. I wonder what the rest of the world is doing?

As I mentioned earlier I like reading about hemorrhagic fevers. Marburg virus is named for the research station in Marburg germany where a bunch of researchers caught the virus from some green monkeys they were working with. It has a pretty high mortality rate. Well, now it has shown up in Angola. I hope that someone read the same book I did, there are ways to keep it under control, but treatment is limited and no good past a certain point in time. All joking aside, its not a fun thing and I hope everyone is praying for those people, if not working to help them.

one step closer to thinking machines. Again, pick your favorite sci-fi cautionary tale.

And again a pet topic of mine, getting the aide to the places that need it goes beyond collecting the cash.