Thursday, June 11, 2009

Frank Herbert's Moisture traps

Dune is a great novel. If you haven't read Dune by Frank Herbert yet - go and read it! Even though I've read it quite a few years ago, and read some of its sequels, it is very interesting to read that some of Herbert's ideas might become a reality.

This Slashdot article is very interesting as it points to a possible use to the moisture traps described in Dune.

This is yet another example of how ideas spawned in the SciFi world might make its way into the real world.

From the pages of a SciFi novel to concept works and perhaps later into real-life versions of the inventions, the ideas of our SciFi authors are making their way over.

See also the reference from Stanford.

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Saturday, June 06, 2009

Is Laserbeak about to be invented?

When I started reading this article I thought "hey, that could be cool". Just a few miliseconds later - that could be REALLY cool, since that is exactly what Laserbeak from the Transformers used to do.

Sure, it might still be in the development stage, but it's cool that during you lifetime, characters and ideas from the cartoons you grew-up with are becoming reality.

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Last.fm shuts down the cool webapps

Last.fm used to be a great site for music fans. It used to be a great way to listen to music online, without having to fret over logging in or doing anything other than picking a musician or artist you like, and it would just play.

I liked it so much that for a long time I've had a web-app as part of the main page of the blog. The web-app was simple: if you click on it, it would start playing songs by Norah Jones and other similar artists.

It's really sad that they have taken the whole web-apps off the net. I've heard a lot of rumors, and read a lot of things online as to what's been happening over there in the past several months.

Perhaps some day, the site will regain its old reputation as being a cool music website online. For now, the need to log in, and the shutting off of the web-apps are complete disappointing.

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