Google Voice

This new service is about to be launched. It has been in test for some time. Call it the "one number to rule them all" service. Users will be able to register, sign up for a phone number in a local area code, and add multiple land line and cell-phone numbers to an account. When someone calls a Google Voice phone number, all the registered phones ring at the same time.

The service takes several telephony technologies and connects them to the Web. It's the voice equivalent of an e-mail address. Once you register a number you never have to worry about which phone you are using, even if you switch offices, homes, or cell phones. You can even press 4 to record a current call.

No matter which phone you use, there is one portal for all voice-mail messages. You can play them on the Web, save them as MP3 files, and even post a voice-mail message on a website. Conference calls are also easy. Answer an incoming call to add it to the current one. Very cool technology, but that record feature is a bit too scary for me. I like to keep my rants current, and not have someone save them for posterity.

I have my beta invite, because I was signed up with GrandCentral, which is the foundation technology for Google Voice.

Speaking of Robots

What’s silver and brown and lies in the grass ? R2 Doo Doo…

In twenty years robots will be doing most of the work humans don’t want to do,
especially illegal robots from Mexico.

Scientific Myths Debunked

You heard it here.
It takes 7 years to digest gum. Not true, it digests as fast as any other food.

Hair and fingernails keep growing after death. Not true, the body dehydrates so fast that this is just an optical illusion.

Chickens can live with their heads cut off. True, because part of the brain stem is left intact when the head is chopped off.

There is no gravity in outer space. Not true, the effect of gravity diminishes with distance, but it never truly goes away. BTW space is not a vacuum, either.

Eating a poppyseed bun mimics opiates on blood tests. True, eating two of them can mimic opiates on a blood screen test.

Toilet Seat scale

Check this out. I think it is a bit odd, but some think it is a very neat idea.

More Bathroom Goodies

Here is a 2.4 GHZ wireless toothbrush camera. You can now inspect your teeth anywhere, just hook it to your computer and get a dentist's eye view of what is going on in your mouth. Might be good to help you find that nagging popcorn kernel. There is also a USB model with wires, but it is messy to use.

Emilio Marcos Palma is Thirty

He was the first person known to be born on the continent of Antarctica in January, 1978. He is also listed in Guinness Records as the only known first-born on any continent.

Emilio had secured a scholarship to study Mechanical Engineering in the Army because he was an 'Anartic', but lost it by having to work on a website as a consultant, and then none of his brothers responded with a military vocation.

He is the fourth of five brothers, Carlos Jorge, María Silvia, Juan Santos, and Luciano, who was born 20 years after Emilio in the same bed, in the same room, in the same hospital in Neuquén, where his father was transferred.

Telling Time the Hard Way

Here is a robotic clock. Fully functional, accurate, interesting for a minute, but not very practical.

Quotable

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant." Robert Louis Stevenson

Orange Juice Truths

OJ is heavily processed and heavily engineered. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize.

Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for over a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies, such as Tropicana, hire flavor companies to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. These are orange-derived substances, essences, and oils. Flavor companies break down the essence and oils into individual chemicals and recombine them. Most concentrate (even Tropicana) comes from Brazil, not Florida.

People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it is not and sits in storage for quite a long time.

BTW - Minute Maid is owned by Coca-Cola. Tropicana is owned by Pepsi.

Speaking of Breakfast

When it comes time for my birthday, I hope someone keeps this web site in mind. It is a bacon-of-the-month club gifts.
How better to tell that certain someone that you are thinking of them every month of the year. Bobby Flay's father bought him a one year subscription. Bacon is almost as good as potato chips. OK, OK, sorry. I just had to do it.

Inspiring Words

The Latin root "spir," which means "to breathe life into," is found in words like inspiration, respiration, spirit, and perspiration.

Speaking of Inspiring

Here is the latest effort to mimic the human brain on a chip.
A collaboration with neurobiologists and contributions of 15 scientific groups from seven different countries, the group is trying to recreate the three-dimensional structure of the brain in a 2-D piece of silicon. The current prototype can operate about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain.

The FACETS group now plans to further scale up their chips, connecting a number of wafers to create a superchip with a total of a billion neurons and 1013 synapses. Roomba has been eclipsed.

Awesome miniature Railroad

It takes about 4 minutes to watch this video, but the view is truly amazing. Leave it to the Germans to outdo themselves once again. You might even get sidetracked by the steampunk robots like I did (the link is on the left of the video). They are becoming popular again.

Google Tip

Do you get as frustrated as I do when searching and Google comes back with sites and articles that are years old? Try typing inurl:2008 or whatever year you like, at the end of the words and it will come back with results for that year only, example: computers inurl:2008.

If you want to see the results for different years, you can type: computers view:timeline and it will come back with this on the top of the page.

You can then click on any of the years and only the results for those years will be displayed.

BTW use quotes if you want to find a particular phrase or string of words. If I used my name without the quotes it would find many extraneous things for tom and many other shubnells. By using the quotes around both names, I limit the search to only me.