Twitter’s first scientific study needs you!
Can some people correctly identify a place using mind power alone? We're going to use Twitter to find out – and you could take part
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Square/new Roomba coming sooner than later?
Could a new Roomba be hitting the streets? Tipster Kason Jinkaid writes:
Not sure if this excites you, but I heard from a Costco salesperson
that they’re getting new Roombas “soon”, though that could mean
months. They aren’t stocking the ones they’ve been carrying (model
550). Also Woot just sold off a bunch for 535s for ~$100 less than
what they usually sell for, so are probably clearing out inventory.
If anything, you can get yourself a cheap 550 or 535?
I doubt sincerely this means the arrival of the square Roomba we talked about last week but it could mean a refreshed model going out to big box stores. We’ll investigate a bit.
Weird Science discovers that video games can kill
Video games are harmful to children: But not how you think. The paper's title suggests it's bad news, starting with the phrase "Dying to Play Video Games." But the harm turns out to be pretty indirect, as it comes from carbon monoxide poisoning. It turns out that, during the power outages caused by Hurricane Ike's landfall in Texas, the use of faulty generators sent about 20 children to the ER. In 75 percent of those cases, it turns out their parents started up the generator in order to allow their kids to play video games so they could while away their time in the dark.
This wine tastes of Mount Shasta National Forest: It's a scene that's made its way to a number of movies and TV shows I've watched: the wine snob carefully sniffs and sips a glass of wine and, after a moment of contemplation, names the region and year of origin of the wine. Well, the snob's got nothing on a mass spec. Given enough samples to work with, the folks who study wines (oenologists, if you must know) can actually figure out where the barrels it was aged in came from. Or, as the authors put it, "the statistical analysis of a series of barrel-aged wines revealed that 10-year-old wines still express a metabologeographic signature of the forest location where oaks of the barrel in which they were aged have grown." And, showing that the study of wines is subject to the same sort of buzzwords that afflicts other fields, the authors have tagged their paper "systems oenology" and called their methods an "oenolomic approach."
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Video: Inside The Google Holodeck
At this past week’s Google I/O event in San Francisco, Google brought a contraption it calls the “Holodeck,” for event-goers to experience. Basically, it’s a near-360 degree way to view Google Street View in fast motion, high definition video. Danny Sullivan posted a bunch of pictures of the thing earlier in the week.
Unfortunately, Google only allows it to show the area at and around the actual Google campus in Mountain View, as I’m sure it doesn’t want any legal complaint from those caught sunbathing in their backyards. Also, while it does zoom past the area where the Google Goats were kept, it unfortunately failed to catch any of them on tape. Luckily, I did that for you a few weeks ago.
Google’s Holodeck isn’t quite as cool as the Star Trek Holodeck, but give them a few years, I’m sure they’ll figure out how to do that as well.
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