The “impending storm of doom” lurking outside my office window today has postponed my hike with the dog. So, I decided to hibernate for a bit and do another quick list of interesting links…
- This is slightly older news (story broke a month or so ago) but I found it timely, as I’ve been semi-in-the-market for a new TV. 3 Flat-Screen Makers Plead Guilty to Trying to Keep Prices High. LG, Sharp, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes (who?) pleaded guilty to charges of price fixing and will pay $585 Million in penalties. Tell ya one thing, when I buy…it won’t be from these guys. Can’t wait for the price drop!
- DNA Strands Become Fibre Optic Cables. In an amazing technology breakthrough, scientists have been able to pass light through DNA strands. The technological ramifications of something like this are astounding. When they figure it all out (likely many years from now), it will dramatically reduce the size of computing systems while increasing speeds.
- Forget having to learn to use your ESP powers to read another person’s mind, Japanese researchers may be doing it with technology! Yet another amazing breakthrough…these guys supposedly had users focus on block letters in the form of the word “N E U R O N” and were able to extract and decipher that using sensors and computing power. From what I understand, this focused mostly what was being presented through the visual cortex (not memory, technically) but it’s a pretty amazing first start.
- I got a new Lenovo T400 laptop for work this week, to replace the HP with more hardware issues than I can count. At first glance, it seems like a nice system. Not flashy in any way, but the insides are what really matters. I’m most interested to see if I can really pull 9 hours of battery life as advertised… I’ll likely do a review of some kind once I’ve had a little time with it.
- Finally, this is some cool technology (that can be used today). For the woodworker in you, save your fingers! The SawStop, an amazing piece of technology that will literally stop a table saw blade in it’s tracks before it takes your finger off. Check out this video below (taken from a pretty cool show called TimeWarp). Awesome stuff.
** Video no longer available
Image Courtesy: SouthPark
