Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway has invented a device that lets him drinks his own urine: Dean Kamen, famed inventor of the Segway vehicle, drank his own urine to the delight of a South Carolina audience. He was participating in a presentation of his latest gadget- a pee-purifying device that his company DEKA Research… Read More »
From the BBC: France nabs gun-toting pensioner An 81-year-old Frenchman has been given a one-year suspended jail sentence for firing a hunting rifle at helicopters dropping water on a forest blaze. David Thiel opened fire on 21 July when the low-flying helicopters disturbed his afternoon nap near Grasse in the south of France, court sources… Read More »
The Asian tsunami, and the quake near Nias, bring home how volatile the region is, particularly Indonesia. (Another quake this morning sent Nias residents fleeing into the hills in panic.) But I thought an interesting way of illustrating this volatility might be to do a sparkline of earthquakes and their magnitude around the world in… Read More »
Japan is now seeling a car that parks itself. Reuters reports that Toyota’s new hybrid gasoline-electric Prius sedan uses electrically operated power steering and sensors that help guide the car when reversing into parking spaces. Rivals General Motors Corp and Ford Motor Co will launch their first hybrids later this year.
Conspiracy theorists reckon the big power blackout in the U.S. Northeast and part of Canada may have been caused by the Blaster worm. Here’s Robert X. Cringely from InfoWorld: “Many plants on the grid run a Windows-based SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system that receives remote commands through the same RPC (Remote Procedure Call) protocol… Read More »