How much storage does it take to store a human life?
That’s a dangerous and highly subjective question, but according to Gordon Bell, a researcher at Microsoft, the average human being’s life requires three hundred and fifty gigabytes to adequately store it all.
On the surface, that seems low. Given that the average two hour DVD runs about four gig, on a strict conversion scale, three hundred and fifty gigabytes would represent about eighty eight, give or take a few minutes, hours of video. A human life is vastly more than eighty eight hours of video. But then, we really don’t know what kind of compression or resolution we’re talking about–after all, my last dream involving sideswiping a Rolls-Royce that had Caterpillar-style tank treads instead of tires really wasn’t anywhere near the resolution of a regular DVD, and it absolutely didn’t have anything on Blu-ray.
But what this means is even more interesting. Or exciting, or terrifying depending on how you choose to look at it. Any schmuck off the street with a part-time job can afford a terabyte hard drive. That’s effectively enough to store his entire life and consciousness almost three times over, and four times if he pops for the one and a half terabyte model.
So the question remains…how long before someone tries the upload?
Assuming that you live somewhere where they won’t pay you good money to bring in your aluminum cans, you might be more interested in recycling them. As such, you know that it’s a good idea to crush said cans first to make them easier to transport, and to make it so you don’t have to haul them in near as often because you can get more in a trash bag. Enter the Zertronix Automatic Aluminum Can Crusher, a spetacular prototype of a device that runs on a rechargable battery and crushes cans.
We’ve all see can crushers before, but precious few of them that are both automated and designed specifically to be included in a household’s decor. We’ve seen some thyroidal monsters before and they do the job, but you wouldn’t want one in your kitchen. The Zertronix model, however, is a simple, sedate black job and looks good with most any decor.
And word is this little fella can go the distance in terms of battery life too, surprising since it’s a can crusher. It’s still apparently in the design phase, so call this a concept for now. But I don’t know if it’ll ever replace the good old fashioned stomp or even more old fashioned forehead crush or still more old fashioned two flat rocks.
Over in Fort Wayne, Indiana, they’re talking about a gadget that may not lower any golfers’ handicaps, but it’ll help keep golfers in their etiquette lines. It’s called the shoe cleaning sand rake, and if you wind up in a sand trap, well, this is just the gadget you need.
If you’ve ever golfed before (and I have, once– my score required NASA-surplus computers to successfully determine and they’re still debating whether or not to actually call it a “Frooglepoopillion”) then you know that getting your ball out of a sand trap is a mess. Plus, you then have to try and rake the sand trap smooth once again, and that may or may not require you to get your feet back in there again, and that means that observing golf course etiquette will likely damage the course in its entirety by causing the golfer to track sand onto the fairway or possibly even the green.
The shoe cleaning sand rake, however, solves this problem by not only being a sand rake, but also offering several brush bristle points for the golfer to scrape clean his shoes before leaving the edge of the sand trap.
Golfers everywhere should love this idea to death.
September 28th, 2009 1:02 PM | by Christen da Costa
Here’s an interesting concept: the Galileo Wheel. What appears to be an ordinary round wheel can transform into a tank track in a matter of seconds. The practical applications seem to be questionable, but these seems to be addressed in the below video.
Out at the University of Toronto, a whole lot of men all over the world are about to start cheering like no tomorrow–seems they’ve built a portable device that will accurately diagnose prostate cancer from a urine sample in less time than it takes to order and receive a pizza on a Saturday night.
That’s right–just thirty minutes and this Blackberry sized device will be able to tell you if you’ve got cancer. No need for biopsies, no need for waiting days on end for lab results, no need for gigantic systems like you see above, just a combination of nanotechnology and biomarker readers working together to start simple, painless, noncomplex diagnostic processes for just about every human condition on earth.
Or that’s the goal, anyway–the device is in the engineering stage and should be ready for use within the next three years. A fantastic goal, and I hope they make it.
Just watch the video. This thing is crazy looking. Obviously taking some tech cues from Segway I would love to see a fat person riding one of these.
The Honda U3-X Electric Unicycle Concept uses internal balance control to ensure that the device stays upright and tops out at a speed of 3.7 Mph. I really want to try one. According to Honda president Takanobu It the concept has been designed with the elderly in mind to help them get around easier without all the bulk of present day scooters and such.
It’s really, REALLY, hard to find a camera any more without an LCD display, so I was definitely shocked to find the OneShot camera, a camera so tiny that it’s about the same size, length and width, as your thumb.
There is no LCD display here. No slots for flash memory, either. But it apparently somehow manages to not only come with face detection, but also never need batteries. This camera actually recharges like some of those flashlights you see–all you have to do is shake it.
The OneShot seems to not only run on a dynamo but also offers no expansions in memory. This may be one of the weirdest cameras I’ve ever SEEN.
This may well qualify as the strangest radio I’ve ever seen. Not only doesn’t it have any outward controls or indicators, it also rolls around freely on a tabletop.
That’s because the very things that make it roll also change the channel and the volume. The volume and channel knobs are built into the underside of the radio.
While it definitely gets some serious points for being compact enough for anybody, I can’t see people readily using this thing. The biggest problem I can see is that there’s no way to tell what channel you’re on short of hearing it on the radio. There’s no indicator to tell you what channel you’ve tuned in. That and let’s face it, radio isn’t as big as it once was unless a clock or a car is involved. That’s not the case all the time, but in all honesty, that’s the case most of the time.
So this is a very interesting idea, but sadly, an interesting idea alone can’t make a good product.
September 11th, 2009 12:42 AM | by Christen da Costa
Here’s an interesting concept from one of Japan’s leading telecommunication providers, the Polaris. KDDI, in corporation with Japan’s Flower Robotics, have built what very well might be Roomba meets cell phone meets Loopt…and then some. The phone itself doesn’t sound all that mind bendingly crazy, but toss it into the docking system, which includes a set of speakers, and the on board motor will fire up the wheels and drive it to its closest power source once its juice runs low.
Using what is probably a combination of GPS and NFC (near field communication) the phone tracks where you went and what you bought. Connect it to a near by TV or monitor and the data can be displayed in a somewhat digestible format.
They plan on having a commercial version of the Polaris by sometime next year.
You know, I can’t imagine how anyone might have thought this was a good idea, but in the early stages of design is a product that brings together a clothespin with an LED light. Dubbed the Lighting Pin, it was never meant to be used for hanging clothes, but rather as a simple, go-anywhere book or task light. It’s just a clip on light, much like the kind you see in garages only much smaller and simpler to use.
It’s actually fairly powerful–you can see above that, when used with a bit of paper, you can actually get a tiny lamp out of the thing. And I believe that, under other circumstances, this might have been a great idea, but no. Not this one, not as long as flashlights are still cheap and plentiful.
But someday, this may be exactly what we need, even if we don’t know it yet.
Oh, and if you follow those links, try the via first–it’ll actually warn you that the read is a processor-hungry Flash-intensive monster, so you may not want to hit that one unless you’ve cleared some memory first.
