sunclean is slightly old news, but really cool. self cleaning anything is ok in my book.

Chairman talks up PPG's $300 million R&D program

] The aim of the Molecular Media Project is to use cells
] and atoms to perform useful computational tasks at
] the micron (10-6m) and/or nanoscales (10-9m) of
] organisation. The Molecular Media Project is
] principally concerned with exploiting polymer and
] colloidal nano-agglomeration or biotechnology for
] new media applications. Digital data in the form of (i)
] still image, (ii) text, (iii) motion pictures and (iv)
] sound have all been modified at the micro/nanoscale.
] This research overlaps chemistry, physics,
] microbiology, computer science, mathematics, performance
] art and design.

Cause glitches with yeast. What a concept.

Molecular Media Project

] MOST electric vehicles work by connecting the wheels to a
] motor. But tomorrow a Dutch company plans to unveil a bus
] in which motor and wheel are one, a refinement that
] promises more miles per charge and a vehicle that is
] safer and easier to maintain.

I always thought this would be smart, though i was never convinced of the economic advantage. you sure better not smack into a curb too hard, b/c that's gonna be one expensive wheel replacement. still, sounds nice, and eliminating all those gears is probably good.

With a Motorized Hub, the Wheel on the Bus Goes 'Round

Building on the paper poseted yesterday...

This is what i've been predicting for a couple of years now. As musicians start to be able to make high quality records on cheap equipment, the need for huge labels will decrease rapidly. the majors make bubble gum mass market crap for the most part, and exist to promote it, but they're ancillary to the process. If they vanished, the marketing would happen anyway, by the coolhunters at MTV and so on. at which point a viable method for individual artists (i.e. no label affiliation necessary) and indie labels to sell music electronically, and cheaply, increases the exposure people get to new music substantially.

when your production costs are low, you can sell for less and make more, and make a living as a musician, rather than try to play the rock star game.

Wired News: The Incredible Shrinking Studio

(U: BTW, the section of this article that deals with prisons is worth the price of admission, but I'll focus on something else...)

] 4. Incandescent Light Bulbs
]
] In reality, these sad devices are heat bulbs.
] Supposedly a lighting technology, they produce nine times
] more raw heat than they do illumination. The light they
] do give, admittedly, is still prettier than the eerie
] glow of compact fluorescents and light-emitting diodes.
] But it's still a far cry from the glories of natural
] daylight.
]
] Plus there's the cost of light bulbs, their
] fragility, the replacement overhead, the vast waste of
] energy, glass, and tungsten, the goofy hassle of running
] air conditioners to do battle with the blazing heat of
] all these round little glass stoves let's face
] it, these gizmos deserve to vanish.
]
] They will be replaced by a superior technology, something
] cheap, cool, and precisely engineered, that emits visible
] wavelengths genuinely suited to a consumer's human
] eyeball. Our descendants will stare at those
] vacuum-shrouded wires as if they were whale-oil lanterns.

So, they are slowly replacing traffic lights with LED lights in atlanta. If LEDs are bright enough for this purpose, one must imagine that you could create a suitable light bulb replacement that:

A. Screws into a socket.
B. Essentially consists of a stick covered in white leds.
C. Has a translucent plastic filter covering it which only emits "lightbulb" wavelengths.

Why is this hard?

(U: Maybe the power transformer you'll need to convert your whopping 120 volts of AC power into 5VDC will create just as much waste heat as your lights did. As almost every device in your house now has an AC to DC power converter, maybe it makes sense to start talking about putting a centralized AC to DC converter in your house and running two circuits, an AC cicuit for major appliances, and a DC circuit for basically everything else. It would reduce a lot of costs, and improve the safety of most home wiring. Of course, cutting over to something like this would be a huge effort that would require widespread coordination from several industries. (For those of you who aren't electronics savvy, basically what I'm saying is that your house ought to have the "power supply" rather then your computer.)

Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die

] " Riddle me this: What would you get if you crossed a BlackBerry
] with an iPod? The answer: The future of the music business. Let me
] explain. Imagine, if you will, an iPod as a wireless digital
] ladle. It would dip into a nearly bottomless stream of continual
] music, scooping up any song you wanted, when you wanted, where you
] wanted. There would be no need for CDs, hard drives, or any other
] storage device. And trying to capture such music would be about as
] easy as trapping mist in a jar. Every song would contain a digital
] expiration date, so, over time, they would evaporate."

interesting concept. viable?

A Wireless iPod Can Torpedo the Pirates

] Within three years, most bank machines that dispense cash
] will run on the Windows operating system, according to a
] study published last week.

Doh!

Wired News: Windows to Power ATMs in 2005

inignoct wrote:
]] this guy makes some interesting points, but i think his final
]] conclusion is wrong. There are still a lot of IM services out
]] there, with varying numbers of users. What happened is not
]] that all but one died out, but that developers built clients
]] that talk to all the networks, and users registered accounts
]] with 2 or 3 or more different IM systems. I could see a
]] similar thing happening with file sharing systems... they'll
]] become neighborhoods, more or less suited to particular types
]] and classes of information, and clients will be built that
]] transparently handle all of them at once.
]
]The thing is that a centralized search system is a lot more ]efficient and finding the file that you want then these p2p ]networks. (This is essentially why I think MemeStreams is better ]then a network of distributed bloggers using reputation enabled RSS ]aggregators. The data is simply more reliable, easier to access, ]and easier to index, when it is all stored in a central location.)

why can't there be a few different central-server based networks? There are different ways of doing the same thing, and optimizations that could be made for particular classes of information.

i'm not necessarily saying he's wrong. i was just proposing an alternate possibility that i consider at least equally likely at this stage.

of course, the whole thing hinges on the adoption of compulsory licencing, which is a whole bag of uncertainty and technical trouble.

RE: LawMeme - Compulsory Licensing - The Death of Gnutella and the Triumph of Google

" He built a prototype for what he thinks could be the future of voting: an agent that mines your online and other computer habits to extract a political ideology, and then makes voting recommendations — or more omniously, even casts the ballots for you."

Voting by Net Proxy?

] So, between spam, anti-spam blacklists, rogue packets,
] never-forgetting search engines, viruses, old machines,
] bad regulatory bodies, and bad implementations, I fear
] that the open Internet is going to die sooner than I
] would have expected. In its place I expect to see a more
] fragmented network - one in which only "approved"
] end-to-end communications will be permitted.

I happen to think this is true. Who is doing the approval is the question. The fact is that if anyone can decide how things are approved, then everything is fine. I cut my whack account over to a challenge response system. Bang, its useable again. I get no spam there at all, and all the people I talk to are getting through just fine. I'm happy. I think it will work just fine... In fact, if the internet had more close knit communities I think it would be better off.

Moving to the country side to escape the noise is not the same as censorship.

The end of the open internet...