Vegetarians must be the worst people in the world.

Why do I say that? Well what else could you say about these weird people people obsessed with eating only plants?

OK so I'm exaggerating. With a few exceptions most vegetarians are very nice people and care deeply about the environment. Which is why they should now reconsider their hostility to plants. Plants that, it turns out, give us the secret to limitless supplies of clean energy!

Nearly two years ago MIT chemistry professor Dan Nocera announced a breakthrough discovery in replicating the process of photosynthesis, which plants use to convert carbon dioxide into organic components - mostly sugar - using the energy from sunlight. Nocera found a way to mimic photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Normally to do that on a large scale you need enormous amounts of electricity and use water of exceptional purity. Nocera however has been successfully testing his process using untreated water from Boston's Charles River.

The exciting thing about this discovery is that it makes solar energy a truly viable, around the clock source of energy. During the day when the sun is shining, solar cells can power a home and at the same time split water into hydrogen and store it. After sundown, energy is still available from that stored hydrogen for use in a fuel cell - either to continue powering the home or to run a fuel cell vehicle.

Since July 2008 Nocera has formed Sun Catalytix to commercialize the discovery. Read more about it at Scientific America because I guarantee that in a five years you'll be contemplating adding one of these setups to your home.

[Scientific American]

Microsoft Project Natal coming in October?

I'm pretty sure when the source for this rumour says "Not quite there yet i think but tye (sic) have til october " he's referring to the design freeze date, not an actual release. Which would make sense if the plan is to get Natal out the door before Christmas.

It's on my wish list whenever the release date!

Microsoft Project Natal coming in October?

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This is going to kill my productivity this morning

Picked up the brand-spanking-new iPhone 3G S this morning from Rogers. No, I wasn't camped out in front of the store all night. In fact I walked in on my way to work at around a quarter after 8 and there were maybe 5 other customers there, all for something other than the iPhone. Praj, the helpful sales rep, got me set up and on my way in less than 15 minutes.

I have an old iPhone that I'd jailbroken and unlocked, and absolutely love it, but this latest upgrade to the hardware really puts it in the shade. The urge to upgrade was irresistable.

I haven't had much time to play around with it yet, but here are my first impressions:

• 3G is very fast. Or maybe it just seems that way because Edge is just horribly slow. Nevertheless the maps app is now a viable mobile application and surfing the Web is far less frustrating. I can't wait to try tethering it to my laptop.
• The interface is much snappier, applications load in much less time. This is almost certainly due to the faster processor they've added.
• The screen's "oleophobic coating" really does help prevent fingerprints and smudges on the screen. I don't think i'll be putting a screen protector on it now.
• The compass app is very cool. When I first heard about this, I thought it was pretty useless (really, am I going to be orienteering with this thing?) but combined with the Google Maps app it's pretty amazing and very useful. The map orients itself in the direction you're facing, and rotates as you move about.
  
• Noticeably thinner than my old iPhone, and it appears to be put together a little better too.
• The video quality is very impressive. Definitely an alternative to some of those cheap SD card-based cams (e.g. the Flip). Here's a clip of my old phone as a sample (compressed for email purposes):

So overall, I'm pretty impressed. Apple's still at the top of the smartphone heap and this latest evolution of the hardware will keep it there.

Twitter makes the cover of Time Magazine

Which means either Twitter has finally jumped the proverbial shark (a phrase itself which has jumped the shark) or it's now a mainstream application destined for even bigger growth.

I'm betting on the latter.



[TIME]

Will the Stream follow the Web?

This article was in my Twine feed this morning (BTW, if you haven't signed up at Twine yet - do it now!). An excerpt:

The Web lives on top of the Internet's infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of an operating system on a computer. And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It's our collective stream of consciousness.

So is the stream yet another step toward our ultimate evolution to a soulless Borg-like existence? Well, not exactly. But yes.

[Is the Stream what comes after the Web?]

Will Twitter's new search capabilities kill social bookmarking?

Last week, Twitter's VP of Operations Santosh Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.

The goal is to make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content, according to Rafe Needleman of CNET Webware.

According to Needleman, who was moderating a panel at the time, Jayaram told the audience and later confirmed that Twitter Search will also soon get a "reputation" ranking system. When you do a search on a "trending" topic--a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar--Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

This is a potentially game changing upgrade to Twitter search. The major drawback to social bookmarking is its vulnerability to manipulation, something marketers are catching on to and treating tagging like another form of SEO. A Twitter-based reputation ranking system, depending on how it's executed, could lend great credibility to the indexed sites and articles. I'm more likely to pay attention to an article, blog, new app or event about social media that, say, Tim O'Reilly tweets about than I am content that anonymous Diggers have tagged.

Thoughts? Do Digg, Stumbleupon, reddit, etc. have reason to worry?

[CNET]

Ray Kurzweil talks about the future of (non)transportation, solar power and BRAIN EATING ZOMBIE NANOBOTS

OK so that last bit was an exaggeration, but maybe not that far off from what Kurzweil predicts we'll be living with in the not-so-distant future.

The inventor, futurist and author of The Singularity is Near in the latest issue of Good Magazine makes some predictions about the future of virtual reality, renewable energy and transportation.

Given the rapid advances we're witnessing in solar energy technology and storage, his belief that within 20 years most of our electricity will come from the sun seems plausible. However, I'm a little skeptical of his suggestion that we'll happily inject nanobots into our brains in order to enjoy better HDTV:

By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain (that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries) will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment.

Yeah....normally I'm an early adopter of new technology, but I think I'll let others turn their brains into grey goo first before I give it a try. Then again, I vaguely remember spending a good part of my twenties doing exactly that...


[Good Magazine]