Category "Fun and Games"
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Puzzle painting: French anagram, Voltaire, Freedom of Speech
We celebrated the end of our puzzles with photos of other puzzles. For today’s puzzle painting: a French anagram, Voltaire, and Freedom of Speech? The solution? Why is Voltaire a puzzle? Well, Voltaire is actually a pen-name that is an anagram of the author’s real name. So there is a puzzle in that name. Of course, it’s also timely, as Voltaire has rather much been in the news lately. The New York Times ran an op-ed today in which someone criticized France for double standards. (The US freedom of speech is constitutionally protected. Speech in France is also free, but there are things in France, which, unlike in the US, it is illegal to say. The Times didn’t point this out, but we should mention that the US has sedition laws that are thought to become enforceable in times of war or major crisis — and are thought to be unconstitutional during times of peace.… Read the restIOT Internet toilet senses disease (and talks?)
We promised to return to Earth after our previous photo post discussing 3,000-year-old Chinese sunspot observations and catastrophic space weather. How else could we do this other than another important Asian trend that we missed: Internet-connected toilets. Don’t laugh, this isn’t a Google April Fools joke (although Google reportedly has installed an earlier non-IOT model of these “advanced” toilets by the same manufacturer, Toto of Japan, in their offices). IOT Internet toilets actually make a lot of sense. These Japanese units from Toto can automatically detect disease via blood glucose, blood pressure, and BMI sensors. They can transmit this health information via WiFi. As they say in startup world, this is obviously a billion dollar idea. All of this can then be integrated with something like Apple’s HealthKit. Thus, they can be integrated with the rest of iOS. So, in the not to distant future, your toilet should be able to talk to you via Apple Siri.… Read the restOh send in the trolls. Oh where are the trolls? There aren’t any trolls….
Send in the trolls…. Oh where are the trolls…. (With apologies to Stephen Sondheim) Our Miley Cyrus SQL Server Hadoop article got trolled on Twitter today. And we thought ‘yes! Finally! A troll.’ Then it turned out he had no Twitter readership. We admit there was a problem with the article. We didn’t list the fact that some people think Miley Cyrus and using SQL Server together with Hadoop are both somewhat messed up. Mea culpa. (Also, we did not come down nearly hard enough on Microsoft. The article goes on endlessly with its tepid praise for SQL Server. If you can’t afford Oracle and need an top-of-line SQL solution it is actually quite a cost effective solution. If you can afford the risk of running Windows, that is. Mainly we attack MySQL. We thought that we’d at least get some MySQL fans trolling us. No, some random Microsoft type apparently thought their honor had been grievously offended with our insufficient praise of Redmond.)… Read the restFunny post about using fashion design as a device GUI
We posted this back on our Facebook page back in January in response to our then-very popular climate dress article. Although our posting is intended to be funny, there is a serious point: perhaps we have a lot to learn from fashion design on how to make better GUIs for our electronic devices and gadgets. We did actually contact the designer, Diffus DK, as mentioned in the Facebook post, quoted below. We had a nice discussion about some of the other products they are working on, including some home furnishing designs and interfaces. (We probably should have posted here instead of on Facebook. As due to the “new” algorithms Facebook has been gradually rolling over the last few months, this blog gets much more readership than posting to Facebook page will. This has infuriated some marketers, who spent a great deal of money buying supposedly highly-targeted, highly-engaged Facebook likes from Facebook at cost typically of maybe $1-$2 or more.… Read the restRecent Comments
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