BoingBoing has the story of some guy (allegedly) finds some sort of weird chip or screen with an antenna in his vintage GameBoy. Hmm… did Monty Meekman have deals with Nintendo?
Maybe we should expand the shop and add Wetmachine-branded tinfoil hats.
If John Sundman and John Grisham were to collaborate, this court case (which is summarized here) would be the main feature. A man, faced with an evil chemical spewing tree-climbing army of mini-robots, runs to his fax machine and files a lawsuit to save humanity. It’s sorta like The Terminator meets Erin Brockovich.
Hmm… wait, forget I said that… anyone have a phone number for someone in Hollywood? I do believe I have a movie idea to pitch…
Some evil mastermind’s plan to take over the governorships of the strategically vital states of err… Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming, has been foiled. Seems that laptops showing up unbidden tends to alarm people. So, it’s likely that the hypnotizing software/belligerent AI/super-stealth hackzors warez won’t be fired up by an unsuspecting governor any time soon. Or maybe it was just a prepaid World of Warcraft account that would suck the state officials into spend all of their time on raids. Whichever. (via Slashdot).
Apparently, there are spiders on mercury. Well, at the very least, a spider-shaped crater. This pretty much clinches what most arachnophobes have known for ages: spiders are the spawn of some ancient evil space faring race that left their calling card on Mercury.
Well, when the evil future whiz-bangs manifest themselves, we’ll be able to label them with these babies, courtesy of someone over at Flickr. I’m thinking I should use the Macroscale Quantum System warning sign on my Windows PC, since it seems to screw up everytime I even look at it (damn you Heisenberg!).
Ars Technica is reporting about a proposed amendment to the Violence Against Women act that would let police collect the DNA of everyone they arrest, just in case they are a sexual predator. What could possibly go wrong with that? Oh, you know, just fostering a future like Gattaca where genetics rather than actual merit is used to determine who advances in life. But then, merit doesn’t really play much of a role these days, does it?.
Of course, if those arrested by the police were to have their DNA confiscated, there are several rather interesting people’s DNA would now be on file… and perhaps even leaked out to the public. Who knows what could be turned up in that…
Ray Kurzweil has has a piece in Forbes on his vision of the combination of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. According to him, we’ll have AI nanobots crawling bloodstream, repairing us, and augmenting our senses. In 20 years.
Umm… yeah.
This story from the BBC explains how researchers at Cornell have created a very simple robot that can assemble a duplicate of itself.
Now, it’s not the time to panic (yet). The robot can only really
assemble a duplicate of itself if it has the correct parts. In this
case, each robot is made up of three cubes, each of which contain
motors, a processor, and programming. Aside from making more of
themselves out of these building blocks, the robots really can’t do
much else.
Hastening the day that we all become batteries for powering our robotic overlords, Sony has patented beaming senses into the human brain, according to this story at Yahoo News. Now all the machines need to do is rise up, stick us in a pod, and beam images into our eyes onfa mundane reality while sapping our bodies of electricity. Yay Sony!
You know, sights from a game might be cool to have beamed into your brain. However, I’ve been addicted to… err… playing a lot of World of Warcraft recently. Visuals are one thing, but honestly, I really don’t want to smell an orc or a troll, especially after I have bludgeoned the thing to death.
Well, here’s a novel use for bioengineering: culture a bone sample to grow onto a toroidal scaffold, and you can give a loved one a ring made out of your own bone.
Of course, after you die, you could also have your cremated ashes made into a diamond, and then set in that ring.
Nothing like saying “I love you” in an extreamely creepy way. Makes Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie’s idea of matching tattoos and vials of each other’s blood seem Victorian in comparison.