[word seen at @Quatrainman]

The idea is that the camera itself is integrated within a pair of sunglasses. Using your fingers to frame the portion of your viewing field you wish to photograph (like a hot-shot photographer framing a scene), wink with one eye to capture the shot. [via Walyou]

OK, clever interface. I love the conceptually seamless interleaving of real and virtual realities. But… I have not yet bought into the “wearable technology” craze. Yes, I think that much technology should be worn, and I believe in tech-integrated accessories; what I don’t buy is that integrating interface technology into clothing is a brilliant idea.

If I have to wear a certain jacket in order to hear music, have to wear a certain pair of sunglasses in order to take a picture, have to wear a certain pair of sneakers in order to track my workout, then I’m going to feel trapped. Who wants to be locked in to an article of clothing? (Note to those wearing chastity belts: line forms to the right.)

You’ve probably put your finger on the ambiguity by now: where do you draw the line between clothing and accessories? You decide.

While the decisions to buy a particular item of clothing or techno-widget might share common back stories, the daily decisions as to what to wear are different: you change styles and items depending on mood, weather, and the need to make an impression. Most of us aren’t prepared to wear the same clothing every day, although we are prepared to wear/utilize accessories much more frequently, even daily.

Here are some of my favorite entries:

• “@John, I am pregnant.” / “@Marsha, will you marry me?” / “Yes @John, my tweetheart.”

• My haiku like a website / running I.E. 6 / really running in reverse
• writing a haiku / I need to use my fingers / counting syllables
• how could anyone/describe their life in only /140
• An Adwords haiku / Google didn’t get the joke / Laughter, ROI
• What’s Occam’s Razor? /// It’s a method for questions /// That cut to the chase.
• The joy of Twitter! / Kevin Rose has sneezed again. / Quick! Blog about it!
  (A quick quip which is a reference to Kevin Rose of Digg fame, who recently created a Twitter account especially for his cold.)
• This one’s so perfect / Clever, funny, all that… wait. / Twitter eats my tweet!
• You’ve been told you can’t / Because you happen to be / A girl. Girls Can’t WHAT?
• This is senryu. / I really don’t write haiku. / It’s not my nature.
  (Technically, haikus are about nature.)

The premise of the contest provided some entertainment for me [a.k.a. @Power2B] this morning:

• Twitter makes me think / Short, declarative statements / What will haiku do?
• Tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet / Self-promoting twitterers / Drive me to delete
• Writing poetry / Serves mostly selfish yearnings / All the moreso here
• Economic melt- / down is pulling companies / Under needlessly
• We thought the lovebird / Had broken free once again / Now he’s got a friend
• Heck, writing haiku / Is so much fun, I might not / Get much done today
• Dearest Twitter friends: / I’d like to hear your feedback / Which haiku to send?

But here’s the great part: “The same territory is an enclave in respect to the surrounding country and an exclave with respect to the country to which it is politically attached.”

(definition excerpted from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, as referenced at Dictionary.com)

Lovely, isn’t it? Came up in the context of the territories of Liechtenstein:

While many of these Liechtensteinian fragments might be considered exclaves, most also border more than one other territory, and consequently only three can be considered enclaves…

[Strange Maps blog]

[via Comic Book Resources — with thanks to Michael Danziger for the tip]

My favorite airport advertising, however, is in Switzerland’s Zurich airport, where ads are projected against the tunnel wall just outside the train windows, and follow you as you are shuttled from one terminal to another. Very slick.

“Just peeling tape is the quickest, cheapest way to provide X-rays… It’s X-rays for everyone.”

Peeling tape from a roll of Scotch releases tiny bursts of X-rays that are powerful enough to take images of bones in fingers and hands, researchers have found.

The unusual discovery was made by a University of California at Los Angeles team, intrigued after hearing that Soviet scientists in the 1950s found that sticky tape, when separated at the right speed, released pulses in the X-ray part of the energy spectrum.

Reporting in Thursday’s issue of the British-based science journal Nature, the investigators used a motorised peeling machine to unwind a standard roll (25.4 metres in length by 19 mm) of Photo Safe 3M Scotch tape at a speed of three centimetres (1.18 inches) a second.

By placing the machine in a vacuum, they were able to measure X-rays that were enough to take images.

[from Physorg.com]

Yowsers. Isn’t anything safe anymore?

*This image makes me hear “Masquerade” from Phantom of the Opera.

I’ve heard over the years that DOS [and Windows] sometimes err in calculations over a certain size. Something to do with floating points, I think. Anyway, I never understood the problem, so I appreciate that this report of Google Calculator having trouble includes an explanation:

It’s not a simple case of a cutoff where things fall apart, though. 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,995 incorrectly equals 0, but 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,993 correctly equals 6. And 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,001 incorrectly equals 0, but 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,000 correctly equals 2.

Perhaps most amusing for the schadenfreude crowd, Google botches some math involving a googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The quantity of a googol plus one, minus a googol, equals 0 rather than the correct result, 1.

[CNet News]

Previous research suggests that higher intelligence is related to better self-control, but the reasons for this link are unknown. Psychologists Noah A. Shamosh and Jeremy R. Gray, from Yale University, and their colleagues, were interested in testing the idea that certain brain regions supporting short-term memory play a critical role in this relationship.

[…]

The results show that participants with the greatest activation in the brain region known as the anterior prefrontal cortex also scored the highest on intelligence tests and exhibited the best self-control during the financial reward test. This was the only brain region to show this relation. The results appear in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. [via PhysOrg]

A very wise educator taught me that impulsivity or the lack of ability to delay gratification reflects immaturity. He holds that children are more emotion-driven than intellect-driven, but that balance swings the other way with age. Once a person is an adult, the ability to defer gratification for a later, greater reward indicates maturity of development. This exactly correlates with the above findings,

“It has been known for some time that intelligence and self-control are related, but we didn’t know why. Our study implicates the function of a specific brain structure, the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is one of the last brain structures to fully mature,” said Dr. Shamosh [italics mine].

Here are the questions that we absolutely must ask:

1. Is the ability to delay gratification solely a natural result of the chronological development of the anterior prefrontal cortex (the ability to wait develops naturally)? Or does it flow the other way, with exercise of self-control helping to mature the brain (practice makes perfect)?
2. Do “external” conditions that negatively impact working memory (hormonal disruptions, physical illness, depression) also have a negative effect on self-control capacity?
3. Is intelligence coincidentally correlated with the ability to delay gratification (for example, are intelligence and self-control controlled by the same brain structures?), or is there a functional relationship between the two (for example, does greater intelligence lead to greater self-control, or vice-versa?)? Alternatively, is the correlation an artifact of how we test intelligence?

And the “threatening questions” (I ought to copyright the term…):

1. Does the electronic virtual environment in which so much time is spent actually inhibit or discourage the development of self-control skills?
2. Could spending too much time as a child in virtual environments which usually provide instant gratification affect adult levels of intelligence?
3. As a professional working to improve User Experience, is it possible that “making life easier” for people is actually doing them less of a favor than it is helping them? Am I destroying individual worlds while trying to “save the world”? (OK, I’m being a bit dramatic here, but I do feel strongly about design responsibility.)

“Greedy Mobile Interfaces”

It’s a sad but common sight in modern society – a person walking around in the world, utterly disengaged, head buried in a mobile device – a victim of the visually greedy mobile interface. […] Even the lauded and successful iPhone demands we disengage with the world and worship it’s visual luster during use.

[from Rachel Hinman’s Adaptive Path blog]

A great phrase: “greedy mobile interfaces”. When we were kids, parents went crazy from teenagers immersing themselves in Walkman earphones to the exclusion of  the world around them. In fact, you might call the Sony Walkman the world’s first “greedy mobile interface”, even though it wasn’t visual. I’ve still got the original (blue and gray metal!) one that my dad brought back from Japan in a drawer here…

Let’s go! ichi… ni…

[via Geekdad]

This is either an awesome hack, or a very clever marketing campaign on the part of Dreamworks. [via Urban Prankster]

…or, as the comments point out, a [possibly dangerous] act of vandalism.

Looking at the second page of description (see below) which claims to hook a fuel cell up to arteries and veins, I’m convinced it’s a hoax. Heck, even in the hospital they can’t leave a TPN or dialysis port open for long without risking serious system-wide infection.

Have a look at the Greener Gadgets Design Competition Site, though — there are some great ideas there (and none so gag-triggering as this one).

“Unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost.”

Translation: chicken pieces compressed and glued together to look like a chicken breast with grill marks printed on.

[from Phil’s Concept to Consumer blog]

Definitely check out the Shelter Box website and consider making a donation. Shelter Box has aided more than 600,000 victims of disaster since 2001.

[via CNN]