The Big Think

Yes, this is how I feel when they try and give me directions. Seriously. It’s the 21st Century. And I have a GPS.

Now this is a great camper design. Wow.

The Ghosts of WWII.

Photographer Sergey Larenkov does some amazingly poignant double exposures of WWII and present day locations.

The longest exposure in photography history. How long? You won’t believe it. I’m practicing my teasers.

Modern technology is making spying much harder.

A train that lays its own tracks. Wow, that’s cool.

No idea why the look changed. I certainly didn’t do it. I kinda like it, but obviously I’ll track down what’s going on.

Robotic bionic exoskeletons for parapalegics. If I didn’t do music, it’s hard to imagine anything more fulfilling than some sort of prosthetic/assistant device work. This tech is way cool.

And interview with a Supercaver.

Space Shuttle launch, as seen from a skydiver’s perspective.

UPDATE: Josh points out that this is sunSET, and therefore the west coast (good eye, Josh), plus that the Cape would never launch with that low of a cloud deck. It turns out that this isn’t an STS launch, but a rocket launch out of Vandenburg AFB on the west coast. Good eye, Josh! Still, cool picture.

Just got hooked up with a Google Voice number (essentially a lifetime permanent phone number). Pretty cool! Today is the first day you can sign up without an invite.

Check it out. It’s free, and all you need is a (free) Gmail account.

Okay, here’s a techie idea I’ve been thinking about.

Now that we’re seeing GPS’s pretty much everywhere, and GPS data is incorporated into everything nowadays (google maps, photos, etc), why not a GPS equipped… cruise control?

One of the little issues with my new Tacoma is that the cruise (any cruise, really) is totally ignorant of road conditions and hill angle. All it sees is that my speed is dropping and so it firewalls the throttle to try and keep it at the speed I set.

If the cruise control was smarter about the upcoming road- how steep the hill is and how far it is until the top- then it could more efficiently goose the throttle to save gas. Sure, I’d lose a couple MPH on the way to the top, but I would be happy to give that up in return for not indiscriminately dumping gas into the engine while the stupid cruise control tries to keep me at 70. So why not provide some sort of look-ahead GPS altitude information to an automotive cruise control so that the cruise knows that you’re about to hit a short hill and can vary its behavior to take that into account?

It seems like this is a good marriage between car tech and computer tech and I’m curious if some enterprising car company will give it a try.