Amazing Tech

Okay I love simple ideas that can benefit tons of people. The only thing that I love more is simple beneficial tech with hilarious alternate uses. Enter Grancrete. I picked up this pop sci link off digg, and I'm blown away. A liquid concrete that can be sprayed on cheap lightweight frames, and it hardens in 20 minutes. Aside from being able to house millions of homeless people in developing countries without adequate shelter, imagine the ability to erect complete concrete walls in a matter of an hour using a frame of styrofoam and some spray on concrete. The nefarious posibilities are endless. Hell, imagine how dorm pranks could be revolutionized by this substance.

Fulda Maybach Exelero-The car of my dreams

The original 1938 aerodynamic Maybach cabriolet was the type of car I've always wanted. Clean lines, long bonnet, decent speed and that unmistakable intimidating look of a 30's coupe. Fulda has recently updated the design to give it this extremely cool timeless batmobile kinda feel without losing the sensibilities of the original. Check out the gallery at gizmag for all the pretty pictures, this car is awesome. A little sidenote,it's built on the platform of the current maybach limousine, but it still does a nice 350km/h.

Wikipedia, it ain't guaranteed to be true, but you could make it better

There's been a lot of trash talk against wikipedia, and against wikipedia critics lately. A lot of it has stemmed from the Seigenthaler snafu ( incidentally it was martians that killed jfk). The most recent entry in the attacks coming from the register:There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility'.


I think Wikipedia should have a warning on it in big red friendly letters that it should not be taken as definite fact. Hell, it's a community knowledge project and as we should all know by now, any community of sufficient size on the internet is teeming with idiots and nutjobs. That being said, there's a lot of good info on there, and for rapidly developing areas in tech it's probably the best general resource out there. It just behooves the reader to pay attention, because Wikipedia is only slightly more reliable than the average blog.

The only solution I can see to make a community project like this a more reliable source would be to add a market mechanism. Some sort of wagering system of points or money where a correct entry/edit would credit your account, and an incorrect entry would debit your account. Depending on the value people wagered (relative to their other wagers), and some careful analysis, you could get some interesting stats on how certain the author is about what he was writing before the story is verified. Clearly this wouldn't eliminate all of the false posts and take care of all the wackos, but it'd sure incent people to check their stories, as well as police eachother.


An interesting side effect of this would be to see how people tried to wield their developed wikipedia reputations or accumulated credit to try and push through false entries.

Blast from the past-the first webpage

Caught a link to this from digg. Here it is guys, the first web page ever:9101 -- /News Now to truly view this properly you should take a look at it from a terminal, or with a gray background (of course best viewed in vga or svga using a vesa compliant card and a crt for that warm holiday glow)

Thoughts about the future

So I just saw about half of the movie paycheck (alas, I forgot the charger for my gmini in LA), which was way better than I expected after the awful reviews. Thanks to the movie I started thinking about seeing the future. So I began to wonder, are there any truly random phenomena in the world such that, with the exact same inputs you could get non-deterministic output. It wouldn't take much, for instance if the systems that cause weather have some non deterministic aspects, that could lead to people behaving differently, and the farther you looked into the future the less accurate the prediction if it rests on human behavior. I'm not looking to find that the universe is completely random, I just want to feel like there are some things that are really just chance. I guess this is something I'll let bounce around the old skull for a while. Afterall, it's not an issue because we can't see into the future, and aside from that there'd be no way to truly freeze the inputs into any given system, but hey it's still something to wonder about.