Cutting the City's Lights to Make a Point
Today, April 06, 2007, 5 hours ago
Officials in Sydney, Australia turned off the lights in their downtown last weekend in a move to make people more aware of global warming. Laura Miller, mayor of Dallas, talks about whether she would consider doing the same thing in her city. I so had this idea two months ago.
Bookmark Bliss: 50 sources for web design inspiration
Taliban Wages War on Afghan Girls' Schools
Yesterday, April 05, 2007, 2:52:00 PM
The reemergence of the Taliban threatens one of Afghanistan's greatest achievements: education. Female students, whom the Taliban denounces as un-Islamic, are at greatest risk. Their teachers are kidnapped and killed; their classrooms are torched; and their parents are threatened.
Cheney Speech Prompts Protests at BYU
Yesterday, April 05, 2007, 10:16:00 AM
Not everyone at Brigham Young University is happy to have Vice President Dick Cheney as a commencement speaker. Student and faculty protests are growing. Given the school's inherent conservatism, it's a surprising development.
Fishermen catch big, old Alaska rockfishToday, April 06, 2007, 3 hours ago
A commercial fishing boat hauled in what may have been one of the oldest creatures in Alaska — a giant rockfish estimated to be about a century old. This kind of thing makes me sad.
Sticky Windows 2.0 boasts new style
Donelleschi Software has released Sticky Windows 2.0, a utility that extends the tab browsing experience to the desktop. Sticky Windows shrinks windows into tabs when they are dragged toward the edge of the screen, providing users with a clutter-free workspace. Tabs are created by dragging windows to any side of the screen, and removing tabs consists of dragging them away from the edge of the screen to re-display the window. The update features "Manual" and "Automatic" tab types, with file drag-and-drop support. A new style and new visual effects accompany a new code base that is more reliable and faster than previous versions. The latest release also runs natively on Intel-based Macs as a Universal Binary. Sticky Windows is priced at $15 -- down from $20 -- to celebrate the new release, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
Obviously, scientists didn't exactly originate the idea of harvesting energy from the sun when they started slapping together solar cells -- plants have been up on this whole photosynthesis mojo for a good long while. Now some researchers at Massey University in New Zealand have developed a range of synthetic dyes from organic compounds that closely mimic the light harvesting that goes on in nature. Other scientists have been pursuing similar solar techniques, but there's a major difficulty in getting the dyes to pass the energy on for actual use. After 10 years of research, the Massey scientists claim to have "the most efficient porphyrin dye in the world." Benefits of the dyes over traditional silicon-based solar panels include the ability to operate in low light, 10x cheaper production, and flexible application -- starting with canvassing roofs, walls and windows, but eventually moving on to wearable items that can charge your electronics stash. A working prototype for "real applications" should be ready in a couple years.[Via The Raw Feed]
While it did our carbon-based souls some good to see Europe and S.Korea drafting ethical robot legislation, we couldn't help but notice that Japan -- the true robotic superpower -- was mysteriously absent from the discussion table. No more! Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has drafted what has been called a "hugely complex set of proposals" to keep the robots from turning us all into a matrix of clean-shaven electrical batteries. The 60-pages of "civil service jargon" are said to go far beyond Asimov's original three laws of robotics. Under Japan's plan, all robots would be required to report back to a central database any and all injuries they cause to the people they are meant to be helping or protecting. The draft is currently open to public comment with a final set of principles set to be unveiled as early as May. Fine, but shouldn't we have a unified set of principles governing all robots, regardless of their country of manufacture?
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