Category Archives

General Entertainment

A higher form of cleaning

Now, this is a person whose process I can get behind.  Up to 250 hours per car and waxes that cost $8000?  Paint that leaves better than when it was new from the factory?  Microscopic analysis?

Sign me up. Do you think he needs an apprentice?

(Jalopnik)

Crack this already

Wikileaks has posted a file that is known only as “insurance.” According to Wired, the 1.4 GB torrent file is ten times larger than everything else available combined – with relative heavy encryption. What is it? I have waited all day and no one has gotten through to the truth yet. Intrigue a la The X-Files!

Spot the difference

Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring (Wired)

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

Web Bot (Wikipedia)

High and Ure claim that the Web Bot works by using a form of the Wisdom of Crowds, with spiders that search the internet for about 300,000 keywords with emotional context[3] and record the preceding and following words to create a “snapshot.” The technology is claimed to be able to examine the collective unconscious and be able to predict catastrophic events 60 to 90 days in advance.

I sure can’t.

Saddest story ever told

In my world, the weekends exist almost solely for the making and eating of delicious pancakes. There are many kinds that I have built into my repertoire: whole wheat with cardamom, walnuts and almond milk, unbleached white with bananas, cinnamon and curry powder, etc. It’s hardly a Saturday without a pan-cooked treat covered in black cherry jam or orange marmalade.

Which is precisely why this robot who can flip pancakes but never taste them is the most depressing use of technology I’ve ever seen.  Thanks for nothing, Engadget.

Network television, you surprise me

I realize I’m probably setting myself up to be vastly, wildly disappointed but I’m super excited for The Event on NBC.

I must know: what are the peacock people planning on doing with this series?  Will the writing and acting live up to the deliciously edited trailer?  September 20th will tell us…9/8c.

Future fashion takes shape

The Fits.me mannequin may be the most cleverly futuristic piece of hardware I have ever seen.  It is a torso equipped with motorized panels that can approximate a wide range of male body shapes.  Clothing retailers can use this to create a database of photos of their garments and when a customer enters in their measurements, the correct photos is culled up.  It works like this:

See?  Genius.  Never wonder what size is going to look best on you again!  As someone who is often let down by unnecessarily boxy menswear, this could save my ass while internet shopping.

(From my work blog, via Engadget)