Published on
December 29, 2008 in
Personal.
As this is posted to my blog I shall be taking off – all being well – from Gatwick for a week in Innsbruck.
For those of you who don’t know, some friends and I are working our way through the alphabet to usher in the New Year. Since 2000 we have visited Aberdeen, Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Flaine, Grindelwald and Halifax. An antipodean splinter group formed last year and their first destination was Healesville, just outside Melbourne.
I hope you have a blast wherever you are and whatever you do.
See you in 2009!
Published on
December 23, 2008 in
Cool.
I’ll leave my review of my drinkings from the Internet firehose with some wonderfully quirky and inspiring stories:
- Adam Shepard had nothing but $25 in his pocket and the shirt on his back when he set himself the target of living in a furnished apartment, owning a car and having a few thousand dollars in savings in a years time.
- Julio Diaz got mugged on his way home and ended up going to a diner with the teenager who took his wallet.
- An architect named Eric Clough created a scavenger hunt for a family in their own apartment on Park Avenue without telling them about it until a year later by means of a letter.
- Mike Mitchell was reunited with his bulk film loader from his youth that was found 45 years later by a stranger in Hong Kong.
Published on
December 22, 2008 in
Cool.
Next up are some of the more bizarre things I stumbled upon this year:
- PETA killed 97% of animals that they took in for adoption in 2006.
- Voytek, the Polish soldier bear that fought in the Second World War, is to get a statue in Edinburgh.
- Hot food can make you deaf or even kill you.
- Eating out doesn’t make you fat after all. Indeed, Ryan Lochte won four gold medals at the Beijing Olympic Games on an almost exclusive McDonalds diet.
- Speaking of the Olympics, the starting gun that is still used gives an advantage to athletes on the inside track.
- Men are redundant as a gender. It’s not just humans either. A “virgin birth” has been observed in a shark for the second time.
- Sending SMS data is four times more expensive than getting data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
- According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation the entire biomass of the Earth will be made out of Jesus in 4.91 billion years.
Unlike Time Magazine, who published their “best of” list at the end of October (and subsequently missed things like the stem-cell-based windpipe transplant), I’ve waited until the middle of December to unleash my favourite stories from the past 12 months.
First up are some of the scientific advances that, frankly, blew me away with potential and implications.
- A patient was cured of HIV by having their bone marrow replaced with marrow from a donor who had a natural immunity to the virus. About 1% of white males don’t have a particular molecule in their cells that HIV binds to (other races and genders differ slightly).
- While a Harry Potter like invisibility cloak has been demonstrated already, they come with a downside: you can’t see out from under them. Remote cloaking gets around this.
- Knots of light are still only a theory but if they are realised then they may be able to contain the plasma found at the center of fusion reactors.
- Another advance that could aid the development of fusion power was the creation of room temperature superconductors. More efficient superconducting magnets are the dreams of nuclear fusion scientists. Unfortunately, these room temperature superconductors require massive pressures to operate. As far as I can figure though, the hard part has been done.
- Two entangled photons apparently “communicated” at 100,000 times faster than light over a distance of 18km. While no information was actually transferred, to observe coherence with this much separation is something that surprised me. Next task is upping the distance: between Earth and the ISS.
- Researchers have placed mice in suspended animation using hydrogen sulfide and revived them successfully. I’m holding out for something a little less stinky.
Alongside these are promises of maglev trains and a space elevator from the Japanese and also a new space engine from the Chinese.
Yes, the next 25 years are going to be exciting.
Published on
December 17, 2008 in
Cool.
The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less but execute perfectly.
Tom Loosemore, BBC web principle #2
These websites are just a handful of single serving sites I noticed cropping up this year. The fail blog from the icanhascheezburger guys came a close second.
Maybe “expect” is a little too strong a word. I should probably say that these are just some of my wild guesses at what may happen next year on the Internet and in science and technology.
Continue reading ‘What I expect in 2009′
This time last year I gazed into my crystal ball and made a bunch of predictions about what we may see in 2008. I actually don’t think that I did too badly at all.
Continue reading ’2008: How did my predictions fair?’
I used to be conceited but now I’m perfect
Nobody is perfect – we could all improve ourselves a little. It could be spending time becoming better at what we already do or trying something different altogether. It could be finding more time for friends and family or it could be doing that one truly altruistic good deed for a complete stranger.
To that end, here is my list of five things that I’ll be trying to focus on in the year ahead:
Continue reading ‘Aims for 2009′
I set myself a few targets at the start of the year. Not hard-and-fast resolutions exactly but rather some guidelines. With the end of 2008 rapidly approaching, I thought I’d have a quick check on how I did.
Continue reading ’2008: Personal targets reviewed’
