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Help Me Destroy My Treo 650

My Treo 650 has been an endless source of frustration. It's probably one of the most annoyingly bad devices I've ever owned. First of all, the form factor is such that it's almost impossible to grab it when it rings without dropping it or flinging it across the room. There's no traction on the surface and it has odd curvatures which seem to be optimized for dropping it. But that's just the beginning. The darn thing crashes just about every other day, usually when I'm answering a call or driving or looking something up. And then there's the truly bad email program that ships with it. OK, I know all about reinstalling, updating it in every way, and believe me, I've done it all, in spades. It's just a sucky device and the software is buggy. So that's the bad news part of this story.

Now the good news: The damn thing crashed for the last time this week. I did my nth hard-reset to restore it to factory condition, wiping all my data, but this time it didn't work. I got the screen of death -- an endless loop that there's no way to get out of. It won't let me finish the reset process. And I don't care, because I bought a new Blackberry and I'm much happier now.

But here's the fun part -- I have been waiting for my Treo 650 to legitimately crash so bad that I could get rid of it and not feel any guilt. And now that day has come. But I don't want to just throw it away: I want revenge. And I'm going to have it.

I want to destroy my Treo 650 in the most creative and entertaining, and destructive, way possible. And I want your help!

Please comment on this message with your proposal for a truly funny, destructive, epic, and creative way to completely obliterate my Treo 650. Ideally you and/or your friends and/or my friends will video the actual process of destroying my Treo and then we'll put it up on YouTube. I'll put up a budget of $200 for any supplies or equipment necessary to fund the winning proposal. Whenever I or anyone has a future mobile device nightmare we can then watch this video and feel a moment of poetic justice. People: 1. Devices: 0.

How to Build a Landspeeder

So as a kid you watched Star Wars and since then you've wanted your very own Landspeeder. The problem is, how to make things hover without using fans, magnets, or special effects? Well, a maverick UK scientist may have invented a way to do it. By harnessing microwaves, and a loophole provided by special relativity, Roger Shawyer has developed a new kind of "relativity drive" that may be the future of space propulsion, and perhaps even terrestrial hovering cars and aircraft. He's received high-level interest from the UK, US military, and the Chinese and hopes to test it in space in a few years.

Extremely Cool -- Sony Invention Links Digital and Physical World

This is an extremely cool video of a beautifully designed interface that connects physical objects and digital objects in a new way. You can drag things off of your computer, right onto your table, and then from there connect them to physical objects, like a book, which can then be moved around causing the digital objects they are linked with to also move. You have to see it to understand. Watch the video. Love it.

Don't Forget SFWIN party - Thursday Sept. 21 in San Francisco!

Hey y'all -- don't forget to RSVP for the San Francisco Web Innovators (SFWIN) gathering this Thursday in San Francisco

The Wikipedia Forks...

The co-founder of the Wikipedia has decided to fork the project, creating a new alternative compendium called the Citizendium. The idea is that it will be comprised of community content that is  moderated by "expert" editors. There seems to be some consternation about this among Wikipedians, while others think it may produce much more reliable content.

A New Kind of Employee Benefit: "Sock Options" -- No that is not a typo

Well I have a peculiar and hilarious situation…

I ordered some black tube socks online from Macy’s the other day.

Unfortunately I neglected to notice that they don’t come in pairs, they come in packs of 6 pairs. Oooops. Because you see I ordered 10 of what I though were pairs.  

So in fact, I just received a box of 60 pairs of black tube socks.

I guess on the positive side, with 60 pairs of socks, I would only have to do laundry a few times in a year….But unfortunately I don’t have 60 pairs of everything else. So that’s not an option. 

So what can I do with all these socks?

These socks were not so expensive, so returning them by mail is more of a drag that it’s worth to me. 

Therefore… what I've decided to do is offer an innovative, and truly compelling,  employee benefit to the folks at Radar Networks -- I am issuing everyone in the company a pro rata pair of socks. Peter Royal suggested we call this "Sock Options."   

Diebold Voting Machines Conclusively Hackable

Allegations of electronic tampering with Diebold voting machines in previous elections gained new evidence this week. A research paper by a team of researchers at Princeton University has conclusively demonstrated that Deibold voting machines are trivially easy to hack. The team not only hacked the machines and changed votes, they created a virus that can do it -- and that spreads from machine to machine.

Some Women See in More Colors Than the Rest of Us

This article discusses an interesting fact -- some women have extra color receptors enabling them to distinguish a vastly larger range of colors than everyone else. Instead of seeing in 3 colors, they see in 4 -- enabling them to tell the difference between 100 million different colors.

Next SFWIN Party -- Sept 21 -- Please RSVP

The next San Francisco Web Innovators Network party is happening on Thursday, September 21. We usually have about 100 Internet entrepreneurs and techies show up for food, drinks, and conversation. If you're in town that week, please come. To attend, RSVP on the wiki. See link below.

Also -- if your company is interested in doing a demo at the event, please let me know.

Location: 405 Howard Street - the Orrick Building

Advance Tickets - $15
Door Tickets - $20

Sponsors

Orrick - Orrick is a leading law firm that has created a new Emerging Companies Group for entrepreneurs, start-ups and their investors.

AOL - AOL is a global web services company that is large and fast growing. AOL's network of Web properties is the second largest in the United States.

Pandora - Launched on August 29, 2005, Pandora's online music service (www.pandora.com) is based on the Music Genome Project, which began in 2000 and is the most thorough analysis of popular music ever undertaken. Music lovers need only enter the name of their favorite song or artist and Pandora does the rest -- creating a tailored stream of songs that share key musical characteristics.

 

RSVP HERE

Study: Woman in Coma Able to Respond With Thoughts

Wow...

A severely brain-damaged woman in an unresponsive, vegetative state showed clear signs of conscious awareness on brain imaging tests, researchers are reporting today, in a finding that could have far-reaching consequences for how unconscious patients are cared for and diagnosed.

In response to commands, the patient’s brain flared with activity, lighting the same language and planning regions that are active when healthy people hear the commands. Previous studies had found similar activity in partly conscious patients, who occasionally respond to commands, but never before in someone who was totally

 

This opens up a whole new range of possibilities. For example, what if there was a way to fit a comatose patient with a brain activity sensor that could enable them to think of certain things in order to trigger things in their environment? For example, suppose that the woman above could think of playing tennis and that would cause the radio to turn on or off in her hospital room? Similarly, if she thought about moving around her house, suppose that could alert a nurse that she needed pain medication or to be repositioned, etc.? This could provide a way for comatose people to communicate with their caregivers and have some control over their environments. It might even be possible to teach them things to think about in order to indicate "yes" and "no" answers to questions. So someone could ask them questions about what they experience and they could answer yes or no. It might even be possible to teach them to communicate letters so they could spell out messages.

The whole premise that a comatose person has no conscious awareness or sensation may be overturned by this. Perhaps they are much more aware than we thought but they are simply unable to control their bodies in order to speak or move? If that is the case, they must be desperate for a way to communicate and this could be the answer.

US Banking System Collapse in 2008?

I recently listened to a talk by Dr. David Martin, given at the Arlington Institute, a think tank I advise. You can listen to it here. It takes some patience to get to the main point -- but you will be rewarded with a mind-blowing new perspective on what may unfold in the next few years.

Dr. Martin describes why he predicts a very likely total collapse of the US Banking system in 2008.  Even more surprising is that he explains how the only hope for bailing out the US economy at that time may in fact be Muslim financial institutions -- the financial entities of the Muslim world -- because they are the most cash rich entities on the planet, and unlike our banks they are not exposed to intangible asset risks.

In other words, as Dr. Martin explains, if for no other reason than this, we should think twice before bombing Iran and the rest of the Middle East back to the Stone Age -- they may in fact be our economy's only hope and we may soon be in dire need of their help. This is a radical hypothesis, but based on very realistic data and in particular, new laws that are going into effect in the global banking world in January, 2008. On the other hand this could be Y2K all over again.

In any case, this is one of the more intriguing ideas I've come across in a long time. Please listen to the talk and then share it with other people. Dr. Martin's hypothesis may or may not be correct, but it certainly should be heard by more people so that it can be debated and brought to the attention of global decisionmakers as soon as possible.

Help Me Answer This -- Specific Blogosphere Stats

Hi everyone, I am trying to generate some specific stats about the size of the Blogosphere. I couldn't find the answer in Dave Sifry's excellent State of the Blogosphere reports. Do any of you know of any studies or reports that answer the following:

• Average number of post per blog
• Average size per blog post
• Average number of comments per post
• Average size per comment
• Distribution of numbers of posts per blog across all blogs
• Distribution of size of posts per blog across all blogs

A Possible Cure for Comas - Electrical Stimulation

This article discusses the potential of using electrical stimulation to revive people from comas. It has been shown to work many times, but American doctors are still not paying attention. A small group of doctors is trying to get some buzz around this idea.

RNAi -- The Next Revolution in Medicine?

This article discusses RNA interference (RNAi), a technique which can selectively turn genes off, which is currently in the early stages of testing. It shows promise for treating a broad spectrum of diseases.

Dolphins are Smarter Than We Think

This is an interesting article about recent evidence of deep thinking by dolphins:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

Web 2.0 Terminology Update: Big Head, Fat Belly, Long Tail

An interesting article on GigaOm showed up today, suggesting that the term "The Fat Belly" should be used to describe the "middle class" of the userbase of the Web -- the mainstream, "fat" portion of the "Long Tail," that comes just after the initial, hit-driven "Big Head" portion of the power-law distribution curve.

What Was Before the Big Bang?

An article in my new favorite magazine, Seed Magazine, by cosmologist Sean Carrol, proposes an interesting new theory about the nature of time and the evolution of baby universes. In this approach, baby universes can suddenly come into being from empty space when random quantum vacuum fluctuations fall into place in just the right way. Admittedly the odds of this happening are incredibly slim, but not impossible, and therefore in an infinite amount of time it definitely will happen over and over again. The only issue I have with the article is that it presents the issue of "time's arrow" in the wrong light in my opinion. The so-called "arrow of time" is simply the progression from low to high entropy states -- that is things start out ordered and become disordered over time. The new proposed theory doesn't really show any way for that arrow to be reversed as far as I can tell. Entropy doesn't run backwards, even in the metaverse. It would seem to me that every baby universe would be born from a highly ordered, extremely low entropy, state, and would then become less ordered and would gain in entropy over time. Although this might happen at different moments in meta-time, each of these universes would still develop in the same manner. But perhaps I'm missing something. Maybe the theorists have a way for high-entropy states to suddenly come into being and explode to become full-fledged universes which then lose entropy instead of gaining it? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. While the chances of a high-entropy state randomly occuring are incredibly slim, in an infinite amount of time they too would all occur at least some of the time -- yet even so, I don't see any reason to think that a high-entropy baby universe would, or could, run backwards towards a lower entropy state. Feel free to comment and explain it further if I got it wrong.

Interesting Idea: Start a Magazine that is a Wiki

I was reading this article in Wired magazine about wikis, where the article itself is a wiki that the readers can contribute to -- and an idea occurred to me. What if you could make an entire magazine that was in a fact a wiki? This magazine would be published online via a Website running a wiki engine. Every issue would be by and for the community of readers. There would be an editorial group among the readers that would decide what to write articles about for the next issue of the magazine, and then the community would work to write the articles. To get into the editorial group, remain there, and have a vote as an editor, a community member would have to make a certain number of (non-spurrious) contributions to articles on an ongoing basis (and/or maintain a certain reputation in the community as measured in some other manner).

I can imagine this idea taking off and a lot of these "wikazines" forming around various subject areas. It makes sense that communities of people who are interested in subjects could help to research and write about them. Of course in such communities there would be some people who put more effort in than others, and some who were more like readers or lurkers. But it would still be much more involving than old "one-way media."

In some ways communities like Digg simulate this -- people essentially vote on what is interesting and this filters up to become the featured content on the site. But that is still one step removed from the creative process itself -- only the readers participate, not the content authors. What's interesting about this proposal is that it blurs the distinction between an author and a reader, and provides a way for a magazine to be truly emergent and community-driven. OK, I'm too busy to start this, but I hope someone out there on the lazyweb takes this idea and runs with it. Please let me know if you find examples of this.

The Hidden Structure of Quantum Mechanics and The Prime Numbers Turns Out to Be 42 After All

This is a wonderful article about how a chance encounter led to the discovery of a connection between physics and number theory that may help explain everything from quantum mechanics to the prime numbers....and the most incredible thing is that the answer may actually really be "42" after all. You've heard of "Life Imitates Art," well this is "Life Imitates Humor" at it's best.

Contextual Ad Targeting On Your Life

This article discusses a new research project at Google where they are working on a way to run contextual ads on your computer that reflect what is taking place in the room around you. The technology works by using the computer microphone to make brief snippet recordings of your room where you are. It then tries to recognize music or TV content that is playing. Next it matches that to a database of ads in order to show ads on your screen that are related to what is heard in the room you are working in. This sounds almost like a joke -- except that it probably isn't. I'm not sure what the benefit to me the consumer would be for letting Google eavesdrop on my life to that extent. Do I really need more relevant ads THAT much? What a strange world we live in.

A Village Where Aging is Sped Up

Here's an interesting video about a village in India where men have been stricken for over a decade with a disease that causes them to age much faster. Nobody knows what is causing this. Men in their 30's appear to be 80. It's strange. Watch the video. Perhaps if someone were to collect some DNA and compare it to DNA of people without this syndrome a cure or at least an explanation could be found. This might also reveal what is different, if anything, about the DNA of people in this village that causes them to age -- and if a specific gene or set of genes is involved, this could perhaps provide a key to slowing down aging in healthy people.

I'm Addicted to StumbleUpon

Ack. Thanks to prodding by Josh, I finally made the mistake of installing StumbleUpon in Firefox ... and now I'm really seriously addicted to it!  Help... all I can do is sit around clicking the "Stumble!" button all day long. I've already found so many cool things that I wouldn't have known about otherwise. Like this guided visualization for understanding 10 dimensional space (the space of superstring theory)...(my brain hurts...).

Excellent Feedback from Om Malik

Today A-List blogger and emerging "media 2.0" mogul, Om Malik, dropped by our offices to get a confidential demo of what we are building. We've asked Om to keep a tight lid on what we showed him, but he may be releasing at least a few hints in the near future.

Om was there in the early days of the Web and really understands the industry and the content ecosystem. I remember running into him in NYC when I was a co-founder of EarthWeb. He's seen a lot of technologies come and go, and he has a huge knowledgebase in his head. So he was an excellent person to speak to about what we are doing.

He gave us some of the most useful user-feedback about our product that we've ever gotten. One of our target audiences is content creators, and what Om is building over at Gigaom is a perfect example. He is a hard-core content creator. So he really understands deeply the market pain that we are addressing. And he had some incredibly useful comments, tweaks and suggestions for us. During the meeting there were quite a few Aha's for me personally -- Several new angles and benefits of our product. Meeting with folks like Om, who represent potential users of what we are building, is really helpful to us in understanding what the needs and preferences of content creators are today. I'm really excited to start doing some design around some of the suggestions he made.

Of course, the needs of content providers are only one half of the equation. We're also addressing the needs of content consumers with our product. In order to really solve the problems facing content creators we also have to address the problems faced by their readers. It's a full ecosystem, a virtuous cycle -- a whole new dimension of the Web.

Funny Quote

I got an email from a guy named Soumya today. It had a funny qoute on the end:

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

-- Bill Waterson(CALVIN)