Link Latte #20

Goes away, comes back.

An earthquake went off when I was away, and killed loads of people… or… some. Some people. Already more NZers have died of cancer than were killed in the earthquake, but cancer doesn’t knock buildings over and burst water-mains etc… so we hear less about it. The British suffer double the number of alcohol-related liver-failure-deaths than the Australians, and the Australians are legendary (in Britain) for drinking too much.

I’ve just got back from Australia… and I think I can quite safely report that the Brits do drink twice as much as the Aussies… but that’s mainly based on West St, Brighton on a Saturday night. Have you been in a British Hospital in the UK on a Saturday night? It’s like M.A.S.H. It’s a war-zone. A blood-bath. One long slow disaster. This is West St in Brighton

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It runs North to South, and at right-angles to Western Rd, which runs West to East. You’ll also notice North Rd… which also runs West to East and South Street which runs West to East as well… and then there’s East St which runs North to South.

People have been drunk in Brighton for a looooong time. Nothing makes sense.

1) Gardening Robot

From Patrick

This is quite interesting because it looks like it’s using a cellular-automata type algorithm to decide where to plant the seeds. It looks like the worlds most complicated seed-dispersal system. Also reminds me of Cicadas who live under ground for a prime-number of years. 13 or 17 I think.

2) Darpa making a cheetah bot

Because you can never have enough ways of running people down and killing them. Apparently it’s going to be modeled on Big Dog, which is another one of those robots that looks like it’s dying for a piss… but the idea with this is to make one that runs faster than humans. It’s all fun and games until your own govt uses them against their own people. That’s you.

3) Turn your own town into a shoot-up zone.

Not sure what’s going on here – but as far as I can gather it’s some sort of VR thing where you can run around your own town zapping for friends with rail-guns and magic-spells and whatnot, just like you can in real life. Looks pretty cool. It’s from Finland. Maybe I should move to Finland. That’s where Tony lives and every time he gets drunk he injures himself. It’s not his fault, it just happens.

4) Hydrogen Storage

This looks interesting. UK company claims to have invented a way of “freezing” hydrogen at room-temperature using nanotech.

Nice logo etc. Unfortunately it’s patented so it will probably disappear without trace and we’ll never hear of it again. That seems to be the pattern. Being able to store hydrogen non-compressed at room temperature is a bit of a holy grail though.

5) Surgery Snakebot

Yea, well that’s totally scary, although I guess it’s less worse than having your ribcage cleaved asunder by people with axes.

6) Mobile Youth Report

$350 Billion per year on cellphones? Don’t talk to me about “lost sales” to file-sharing… your target market spending 1/3 of a trillion a year on something other than your product actually IS “lost sales”. It’s almost genocidal. A trillion dollars on SMS since it was invented? Jesus. I looked for a source for their figures – all locked up behind a paywall, so who knows what is true. Still… holy crap.

Speaking of Trillian (my first attempt at spelling trillion), Here’s Zooey with a gun of some sort

O Zooey, Zooey, Zooey. It could all have been so different etc.

7) Tiny flowers from Halfland

with heart-shaped bokeh (I notice these things now)

I quite like micro-flowers. Flowers are amazing when you start taking photos of them. Like alien spaceships. Or something.

“TARGET DATE: MARCH 2011?” Cripes. That’s immediate. My own movie deadline has subtly shifted from “This summer” to “This year”.

8) Millimetre Scale Computer

(via)

For monitoring bodily functions and stuff. Eye-pressure for glaucoma sufferers… but it could be used for all sorts of things. Mesh network repeaters for example – but mainly as autonomous sensors etc. If the radio-connections are sufficiently fast and narrow-band, it also raises the possibility of disconnected systems within a single unit. Eg: a robot with detachable eyes. Cells. That sort of thing.