Never see a red light again

The MIRT, or Mobile InfraRed Transmitter for Emergency Vehicles (Which is MIRToEV really, but oh well) is a traffic signal pre-emption transmitter. These have today been outlawed in the UK, making me wonder, will it work in the rest of mainland Europe? If so, I want one, and if so, what frequency does it broadcast on, as you must be able to make one for less than $ 399,.99!

Or maybe there’s just other manufacturers I can’t find right now…

Ah… From The Tech FAQ:

The transmitter is an infrared light which is flashed at the receiver. The transmitter inside the vehicle may transmit a low-priority signal (10 Hz) or a high-priority signal (14 Hz).

Keyboards

Well, I was going to do this thing on the fabulous Fingerworks TouchStream vs the new thing I found, but it’s turned into an obituary for Fingerworks – they must have priced themselves out of the market 🙁

Important note!

FingerWorks has ceased operations as a business.



Always wanted one of those, but can’t even find them on E-Bay, don’t know when the company bust (so maybe they haven’t sold the liquidation yet?)…

Anyway, the new bright (literally) thing, is the Optimus programmable keyboard: you can program the keys to show what you like, and they’ll release it with an open source API so you can add iconsets and functionalities and share them around… cool!

Film inspired reality!

What was that film where the guy invents a spray that freezes and dissappears dog poo?
Well, these guys have a spray that does something scarily like it…

Garrick Hamm, Creative Director, Williams Murray Hamm and D&AD Education Chairman adds, “I always hope to come away from student judging with the names of a couple of new, exciting creatives, or a killer idea to share with the rest of my studio – but nothing prepared me for dog shit! Not only was this a clever, environmentally useful idea but it was extremely well thought through and the execution was slicker than an Italian racing driver. If these creatives haven’t got jobs by the end of the summer, please send me an email…but I have a funny feeling they will be busy

There supposed to be something on here as well

Screw Spaceship 1, go round the moon!

MOSCOW – A Russian rocket manufacturer is proposing sending space tourists on a ride around the moon for $100 million, and a top official of the nation’s space agency said the project could be viable.

from here

Just slightly more expensive than going with Burt Rutan and Richard Branson on Virgin Galactic at $100m

Traffic cops not necessary

In the Ukraine ALL traffic cops were fired in one fell swoop – and what changed to the safety and traffic situation? Exactly NOTHING!
Get rid of them here!

From his subordinates Yushchenko demanded – and received – a plan to dissolve the DAI and by the beginning of July the deed was done, the executive order signed.

Ukraine’s once-feared traffic police ceased to exist.

….

But that’s not the way it turned out. Drivers in the Ukrainian provincial cities of Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Lviv reported traffic was moving quite normally and most drivers were obeying regulations, even though there were few, if any, traffic cops around to enforce them.

It’s an alien Ray Gun

This baby is a good old fashioned Ray Gun (we don’t need no frickin’ lasers!) which heats human skin to unbearable pain within 5 minutes without burning it…

ADS systems are a new class of nonlethal weaponry using 95 GHz-millimeter-wave directed energy. This technology is capable of rapidly heating a person’s skin to achieve a pain threshold that has been demonstrated by AFRL human subject testing to be very effective at repelling people, without burning the skin or causing other secondary effects.

US backs a Nuclear India

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Bush, in a dramatic policy shift, promised India full cooperation on Monday in developing its civilian nuclear power program without demanding that it sign a major nuclear arms control treaty.

From Reuters

What about Pakistan? They sure won’t be happy… will this jeapordise the ongoing peace processes that are finally progressing in Kashmir?

A Secret Service

A totally new look at how to keep a secure list of passwords: broadcast them live on webradio to the world!

A Secret Service invites you to submit your passwords and a timestamp for storage on the Secret Service website. It is then translated (text-to-speech), automated and broadcasted via webradio and live at Mediamatic Groundfloor every hour on the time of your choice. Because nobody can know that this is your password or what the purpose is, this seemingly paradoxical way of storing something very secret and intimate in public space can be considered completely safe.

To guarantee the absolute safety of your information, Mediamatic will take advanced security measures to protect the server on which your passwords will be saved. You are invited to the festive OPENING on the 15th of July, where the safety of these measures will be on display. If you are thoroughly convinced by the safety, you are invited to place your most sensitive information in our care.

Personal World Map

The world is sperical, and if you’ve ever seen a map, you may think you know how ffar away bits and pieces of it are from you. And that would be vaguely true, in a geographical sense (well, the maps we see are generally not very geographically correct, but that’s a different story), but in terms of how long it takes you to get from A to B or in terms of how much it will cost you to get from A to B it’s a whole different story.
So this map shows you the distances based on cost and travel time from your point of reference (ie. where you are on the map). Interestingly, Africa is very isolated from almost everywhere, whereas the US and Europe are very very close indeed.