November 7, 2008 - Psst

November 7, 2008 - Psst

SweetSkinz tires have wild patterns in them, and are even reflective at night. Nice idea–unfortunately only in MTB sizes so far…

Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2008” – in a painful one-at-a-time UI. Favorites I hadn’t seen before: a shadowless skyscraper; flying wind turbines; the MonoTracer enclosed motorcycle; enhancing food with sounds; and a braille camera for the blind

YouTube – Awesome CNN Hologram Interview – whoa. Reason enough to have an election, if you ask me…

Writing as sense-making: “I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.” – David Foster Wallace

Dean Kamen on the interesting way they score the FIRST robotics competition – “We work really hard to ‘ambivalence-scale’ our competition, as we call it. We create a competition where there’s a lot of luck added to it. The rounds are only 2 minutes long; the scoring system isn’t particularly fair. It favors, throughout each round, the underdog…We did everything we could to make it fun enough that if your robot didn’t win, it’s not a personal thing. ”

High-speed photography of a parrot in flight – if I could design something 1/100th as elegant, I’d be ecstatic. Nature does it for free…

Discount Dead On Annihilator – crazy tool with a great name. Axe, nail puller, demolition hammer, chisel, wrench…and bottle opener.

“I scarcely spoke at all for two years. I couldn’t be completely free of words, but my wife had to talk to people for me. I didn’t want to say anything, make any sounds, until I was pretty sure what those sounds meant and why I wanted to use them.” – R. Buckminster Fuller, explaining his two-year silence.