Category: Uncategorized

Francesco Marciuliano: “Sure, it’s nice to know what you want to do for the rest of your life but where’s the joy when it’s a career that initially promises little outside of the opportunity to repeatedly defend your choice to anyone who footed your college tuition?”

Brian Mastenbrook: “It’s come to my attention that it’s hard to find good tutorials for Lisp programming using Google. I think it’s time to rectify that situation by letting Google know about the good tutorials for Lisp, especially the good tutorials about Common Lisp, that are available. Won’t you help me?”

Jamais Cascio: “Researchers at the Danish group Risø have developed a polymer photovoltaic technology that would cost about 2% of current silicon PV panels: Risø claims that their new polymer pv should run about $15/square meter, as opposed to the $800/square meter they list for silicon. Moreover, this plastic solar cell has a useful lifespan of about two and a half years, which Risø claims to be a record duration for plastic pv.”

Joi Ito: “The PhoneGnome is box that you connect to your phone line and your Internet connection and attach a phone to. The magic happens when PhoneGnome figures out your phone number and auto-configures everything so that in the future, all calls to other PhoneGnome users go over the Internet instead of the phone line.”

Jeremy Faludi:

Flexible concrete might sound like a gimmick, but most concrete fails because it is brittle, so cracks develop over time, and eventually become catastrophic. U Michigan has reduced this brittleness to make a concrete “500 times more resistant to cracking and 40 percent lighter.”

Larry Greenemeier: “Many open-source startups aren’t even creating their own software–they get off the ground by selling services to help businesses implement popular open-source projects.”

Kondra Systems: “Like any other small company attending a show, we wanted a bit more splash to set us apart but had a hard time justifying the booth costs. So instead of going with a collapable wall with some custom artwork, we took the $2000 and decided to see how far we could stretch it by building our own custom booth.” (via Make:Blog)

George Douglas:

“We have seen steady progress in photovoltaic concentrator technology. We are working with advanced multijunction PV cells that are approaching 38% efficiency, and even higher is possible over time. Our goal is to install PV concentrator systems at $3 per watt, which can happen soon at production rates of 10 megawatts per year. Once that happens, higher volumes are readily achieved,” Hayden, Solar Program Coordinator at APS, said.

Raymond Chen:

First, Chris Pirillo says (timecode 37:59) he’s not entirely pleased with the word “podcast” in Episode 11 of This Week in Tech. The Seattle-PI then reports that the sentiment is shared with “several Microsoft employees” who have coined the word “blogcast” to replace it. Next, c|net picks up the story and says that the word “podcast” is a “faux-pas” on Microsoft campus.

Kevin Kelly:

This overpriced book [40 Principles: Triz Keys to Technical Innovation] contains a set of 40 design strategies for inventing. It is a summation of engineering design principles devised by a Soviet patent examiner in the 1960s who extracted these principles from a study of 200,000 patents. This guy, Altshuller, says that the 10% most innovative patents would use one of these 40 strategies for their novel solutions. Altshuller then went on to construct a system to help engineers consider these elemental strategies for the problems they were working on. His system is called TRIZ, and it has a cult following among process engineers.