This little USB gadget from Korea makes some pretty lofty claims. Not only will it help you chill out, it could help you memorize Pi to 100,000 digits, or might turn you into the next Rembrandt. Or Obama.
The HIMS Brain HUBI biofeedback device plugs into your computer, and interactively monitors electrical impulses from your fingertips to help you control your brain into the proper state of mind to accomplish nearly anything. Now how it does this without actually attaching to your scalp, I have no idea. I’ll leave that to the scientists and snake oil salesmen to explain.
The included software lets you choose from a variety of profiles including relaxation, creativity, memory and concentration. Unfortunately modes for Jedi mind trick, levitation and that head-slashing thing that Sylar does with his fingertips aren’t included. Maybe they’ll get those working in a future model.
As you think, you do your darnedest to coordinate your brain waves with the graphs displayed on the screen. Think of it like mind-controlled Guitar Hero. Damn, that sounds like a good idea for a game - I’d better patent that.
If you want to find out exactly how much the HUBI lives up to its promises, you’ll have to exchange aboutt $206 (USD) cash for KRW 290,000 then order one from Korea to try one out. At this point, there are no plans to bring the device to North America or Europe.
Toshiba is working on an ultra-thin OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) display that could be used to wallpaper your home, turning any wall into a huge TV.
From Toshiba:
"The wallpaper uses light that has been redirected by an ultra-fine grating that is fabricated by self-assembled nano particles." Also according to Toshiba, it's several years from commercial production.
Damn — I want it now. Lenses will amplify the light, and brightness levels close to more traditional TVs will be possible with nanotechnology. Entire rooms could be covered with a floor-to-ceiling glow. Instead of picking a permanent color palette for a room, set one for your mood at the moment. Don't paint a static mural in your kid's room, just install this and keep moving murals playing all day long. Keep a sunny day in your kitchen, all winter long. Or just use it as the world's biggest badass TV. That works for me.
This is “Chicago”, the fake Arab town built in the middle of the Negev desert by Israel to train its military forces in urban warfare.
Though artificial, our hometown's dessicated twin is “highly realistic.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose photographs of “Chicago” collected in their eponymous book and replicated here, wrote: “To create this alternative universe, Palestinian architecture has been carefully scrutinized. Roads and alleyways have been constructed to mimic the layout of towns like Ramallah and Nablus. In one corner the ground has been covered in sand, a reference to unpaved refugee camps like Jenin. Graffiti has been applied to the walls with obscure declarations in Arabic: 'I love you Ruby' and 'Red ash, hot as blood'. Burned-out vehicles line the streets.”
Perhaps more interesting than its spatial authenticity is the fact that the history of this ghost town “directly mirrors the history of the Palestinian conflict.”
The first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawl, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here.
This is where generations of Israeli soldiers rehearse over and over again like actors in a Hollywood studio set, with props on hand or littered about, before stepping out in front of live television cameras, the whole world their captive audience, to play out their well-choreographed routines.
Meanwhile, “Chicago” is so named because its bullet-ridden fake walls apparently recall the punctured real walls of Al Capone's Chicago. While still acknowledging the dizzying complexity of Arab-Israeli relations, one wonders if a small yet meaningful step towards lasting peace could be taken if, on Israel's side, it stops vicariously engaging with the Palestinians in secret, replicant cities after first exorcising this mythological, gangster-infested Chicago from their collective memory and replace it with something real and true?
Not everyone was a mobster then, the same way not everyone offered something to our former governor for Obama's senate seat. The same way not all Palestinians are terrorists.
In any case, should the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman and his party's racist ideology get their way in a ruling coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu, and all Israeli-Arabs get expelled from Israel, their homes and cities dismantled and resettled over, at least part of history, albeit one written by others, has been recorded for future archaeologists to reconstruct.
Un peu hors topic, mais cette fausse ville esquissée et pourtant bâtie, quelque part entre le terrain d'entraînement et l'environnement de jeu vidéo (et qui en passant commente sur la nature de la relation entre israéliens et palestiniens) dégage une atmosphère suffisamment étrange pour être postée ici, une sorte de Las Vegas noir, remplie de clichés.
We’ve noted Facebook’s gradual crawl into the realm of lifestreaming – showing friends’ activities from outside services like YouTube, Flickr, and Delicious in your News Feed. Today, AOL’s $850 million social network Bebo is piling into the space too, with a slew of new aggregation features that build on the additions made back in December.
The big new twist on Bebo’s lifestreaming features is that it will automatically import all of your friends’ activity on the different services you register, even if those friends aren’t Bebo users. This functionality comes by way of Socialthing, the social aggregator that AOL acquired last summer, and is a similar but more automated concept to FriendFeed’s “imaginary friends.”
At launch, Bebo is offering support for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious. That’s a smaller number of services than the competitors, but the company is hoping that with its unique ability to pull in activities from your disparate friends automatically, it can make up ground. Another way the company hopes to do that is by getting celebrities into lifestreaming – they tout the fact that a number of prominent artists like Miley Cyrus and All-American Rejects are already using the features.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Socialthing hadn’t even left private beta when it was purchased by AOL, but it did seem to make social aggregation a lot easier to get excited about, since it leveraged your existing social networks and didn’t entail having to find a whole bunch of new people to follow, ala FriendFeed. There’s also AIM integration coming, wherein AIM profiles become Bebo profiles, which could lure millions of new people into the site.
AOL and Bebo have a huge audience and in many ways a better, more mainstream take on an idea that has proven successful so far with early adopters. Will it be enough to get the masses into social aggregation and prove that AOL didn’t massively overpay for Bebo? Probably only if tens of millions of people cling to it, versus the hundreds of thousands that use existing social aggregators.
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Les liens additionnels de l'article de Mashable pointent vers tout une série d'"aggrégateurs sociaux". C'est évidemment une nouvelle tendance pour tous les réseaux sociaux, nouvellement labellée "Lifestreaming". Toute sa vie, en stream et en ligne, pour ses "friends"!
Fluxxlabs work to date has been focused on sustainable energy harvesting, specifically in the form of converting small amounts of human energy into electricity. The design firm consists of two partners, Jennifer Broutin and Carmen Trudell. Both Jennifer and Carmen graduated from Columbia University�s Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design program, where they began research and collaboration.
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