scanman’s posterous

Brain Flash Drive by Elle Topo

X Ray reclaimed paper notebooks by Momerath

Lungs Anatomy Illustration T Shirt by Isotope

cool.

i especially like the radiograph used as notebook cover. i think there's a great utility/business idea for all the waste films generated in large radiology departments.

As someone who’s fascinated by the idea of Apple doing some sort of small device—not necessarily a netbook, but something bigger than an iPod touch and smaller than a MacBook—I pay close attention to what Apple says about the whole netbook market.

(If you haven’t been paying attention, a netbook is a cheap, small laptop. PC-makers are selling a lot of them. Apple doesn’t make one.)

During the company’s quarterly conference call with financial analysts Wednesday, the analysts once again wanted to know what Apple was doing in the netbook market.

Back in January’s first-quarter results call, an analyst asked Apple COO Tim Cook what Apple’s intentions were for the fledgling Netbook market.

What Cook said then was that netbooks were “much less powerful” than consumers wanted, with cramped keyboards and small displays. But, Cook added, “We’ll see. We are watching the space… We’ve got some ideas here.”

If you follow Apple regularly, you’ll know that the company often runs down its competitors in a category before introducing its own game-changing product in that category. Cook’s past statements lead me to believe that Apple is indeed planning its own answer to the netbook—and his statements during Wednesday’s conference call did nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.

Cook also repeats the claim Steve Jobs made last year, that in many ways the iPhone and iPod touch are Apple’s “answer” to the netbook—or at least, to many consumers’ needs for a small electronic device that does browsing and e-mail.

Then comes the tease. Cook is suggesting that perhaps Apple is working on an “innovative product that makes a contribution”—not a big shocker there. In three months, the ideas Apple has for the netbook space have become “interesting.”

And finally, the hammer: “I think [it’s] a stretch to call [the netbook] a personal computer.” Ouch. With smack talk like that, can Apple’s entry into the netbook market be far behind?

interesting!
now i've got to think of ways to convince my wife that i need one more toy before the apple netbook comes out :)

A new 20% time Google project has just launched called Google Similar Images. It’s pretty self-explanatory — when you search for an image and find one close to what you’re looking for, Google can now find ones that it believes to be the same, or similar. This type of visual search is similar to what like.com has been doing for a while, but is potentially much more powerful with Google, as the search giant currently looks at hundreds of millions of pictures of just about anything you can imagine, across the web.

But it’s interesting that this is not done by way of optical recognition. That technology is what Apple, for example, is using in the newest version of iPhoto to look at faces in images and determine if other images contain the same people. Because Google already has its vast database of web images and a lot of metadata thanks to projects like the game in which you tag photos, and more recently, sorting images by color, it has a bunch of different data points it can work with to make Similar Images work.

amazing possibilities for radiology!

*also see this at Geek & Poke :)

In 2003, an independent scholar from New Jersey began submitting limericks for a competition in mini-AIR, the monthly online supplement to my magazine, Annals of Improbable Research. The contest challenges readers to read an off-putting scholarly citation, and explain it in limerick form. Martin Eiger so consistently won that we eventually banned him as an unfair competitor, gave him the title Limerick laureate, and now publish him every month. He handles a huge range of subject matter.

An early Eiger limerick summarised a Japanese study called Pharmacological Aspects of Ipecac Syrup (TJN-119) - Induced Emesis in Ferrets:

If you're hoping to hash out a thesis,
And stuck for a topic: emesis,
As triggered in ferrets
Undoubtedly merits
Much more than a mere exegesis.

Warwick University mathematician Jonathan Warren's 1999 treatise On the Joining of Sticky Brownian Motion includes a three-page proof of the Non-cosiness of Sticky Brownian Motion. Eiger explained that:

Though only three pages - a quickie
- the Warren proof really is tricky.
It puts forth the notion
That Brownian motion
Is cosy, except when it's sticky.

A team from the University of Manchester and Germany's Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg produced a study in 2000 called The Functional Morphology of the Petioles of the Banana, Musa textiles. Eiger produced this summary:

The petiole's structure is vexing.
It bends, but it's strong. How
perplexing!
The veins through its length
Account for its strength.
Its U shape accounts for its flexing.

In 2004, the journal Brain and Cognition published a paper called Feigned Depression and Feigned Sleepiness: A Voice Acoustical Analysis by four researchers at the University of Connecticut. Eigerised, it became:

When people pretend they're
depressed,
Or when they pretend they need rest,
Their speech rates will change,
But never the range
Of pitches they use. Who'd've
guessed?

pure genius!

eiger's title "limerick laureate" is very apt!!