So the other day I was trying to figure out why some HTML code I was working on wasn’t formatting correctly. I had spelled the code for the email link as “malito” instead of the apparently correct way which is “mailto.” The only thing is, ever since I’ve been on the Internet, I always thought the word was “malito.” what a shocker.

I’ve actually started reading a page a day upside down, just to shake things up a bit… slows my reading speed down by about a factor of four, I would say. I was wondering how many extra calories you burn by doing intense mental work as opposed to being idle - might be kind of hard to measure.

reminds me of Simon Singh talking about his new book Big Bang…. the cool part was
where he plays back ’stairway to heaven’ in reverse, and shows us the demonic message hidden inside. how did anyone even figure that out?

So I was looking around Stanford’s Computer Science senior project faire (huge flat screen TVs everywhere) when I came across undoubtedly the coolest thing I had seen in quite some time, a wireless digital pen that would write on seemingly regular paper - with your strokes somehow showing up on the computer! As it turns out, the paper was actually specially-made paper from Anoto which has microscopic squares on it that allow the special pen to figure out where it is relative to the paper…. Anoto had actually given Mike Bernstein, Avi Lev Robinson-Mosher, and Ron Yeh the bluetooth drivers to test out live streaming. Now if I could only get my hands on the driver and make my own…

Ah, this harkens back to the days of A.P. Chemistry: it’s possible to utilize chemical reactions to heat foods and chill beverages by utilizing their endothermic/exothermic nature. The U.S. military’s meals ready to eat (MREs) make use of a “flameless ration heater (FRH), .. which is a water-activated exothermic chemical heater designed to heat the entree of an MRE by raising the temperature of the 8-ounce entree by 100 F in 12 minutes.” Pretty neat. There doesn’t seem to a chemically safe counterpart for drinks, but Miller is set to launch a new self-cooling beer can from here which uses a vacuum underneath and a drying agent to cool the temperatures. 

I’ve been working with some other students on Embrace, a simple device that aims to keep premature babies warm in a manner much cheaper than conventional incubators; for the heat we’ve been using phase-change materials (PCMs) than release heat as they change state from solid to liquid.  Though we have yet to see whether it’s more effective than kangaroo care.  While trying to find a chemical timer, Prof. Zare pointed out these chemical clock reactions, though the problem is they’re not reversible.

First read about this theory in the book The Medici Effect. The premise is that you “compensate for higher risks in one area by taking lower risks in another” - best illustrated by a few examples:

* driving into a dark, narrow tunnel, you slow down… as soon as you get out, you speed up again.
* a famous study in Munich where anti-lock brakes were installed in half of the cars in the sample which were secretly monitored for 3 years; conventional wisdom would dictate that the new brakes would decrease the number of accidents, but in fact the number of accidents remained unchanged - from the theory’s perspective, due to the drivers compensating for the better brakes by driving more agressively.
* the introduction of zebra crossings - again, didn’t change the accident rate because pedestrians had a false sense of security.
* child-proof caps on medicines: actually increased the number of poisonings due to parents getting complacent and leaving them around the house.

So i just got this fancy new thermos made out of “virtually indestructable polycarbonate”…. and then I realized that probably means the world is stuck with it forever. apparently the only other man-made object visible from earth besides the great wall of China is the aptly-named Fresh-kills landfill on Staten Island which takes up 2,200 acres of land. i guess “the graduate” got it right - the future is plastics, whether we like it or not.