A pet peeve: the popularity of bottled water when, most of the time, perfectly good drinking water is available from the average kitchen tap. I mean, why are people willing to pay good money for water when you can get it more or less for nothing? Are we that susceptible to marketing gimmicks and [...]
Archive for June, 2008
I hate it when I can’t find my TV remote. Once I even managed to leave it in the refrigerator (don’t ask) and couldn’t find it for three days.
But the days of TV remote losing may soon be over, if a UC San Diego computer science grad student named Jacob Whitehill has [...]
Remember the Steve Spielberg movie “A.I.,” about an artificially intelligent boy robot who goes in search of his adopted human mother? An underrated film, I think. But the reason I bring it up is because one of the main characters is a “male” sex-bot, a sort of mechanical gigolo hired by women for [...]
Do you ever walk around your neighborhood, spot a particularly tall, thick tree and wonder how old it might be? (You can find out, of course, by chopping the tree down and counting the rings inside. Not that I’m suggesting you should actually do this, as it would prematurely end the tree’s life…)
Well, [...]
If you could choose, would you rather be smarter and die sooner, or be dumber and live longer?
If you’re a fruit fly, you don’t have a choice–the smarter the fly, the sooner it dies. That’s according to a study done by scientists at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. In their own words, [...]