Apparently for real, from PC maker Asus:
Floral Blossom is pink with a flowery smell; Musky Black sports graffiti art and emits an earthy musk; Morning Dew comes in pastel green and offers that refreshing early a.m. je ne sais quoi; and Aqua Ocean gives off an aquatic aroma and comes with sky and wave imagery on the cover.
MediaBistro, unimpressed:
I can’t wait to get on a plane in a middle seat in coach surrounded by this stuff.
[Floral by Asus]
It is nice when someone points out the obvious fact that for most people, most stuff (i.e. consumer durables) is pretty good nowadays – at least compared with equivalent stuff from a long time ago. Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand discusses this is the 2008 World Question “What have I changed my mind about?” – he now believes that good old stuff sucks:
Well, I bought a sequence of wooden sailboats. Their gaff rigs couldn’t sail to windward. Their leaky wood hulls and decks were a maintenance nightmare. I learned that the fiberglass hulls we’d all sneered at were superior in every way to wood.
Remodeling an old farmhouse two years ago and replacing its sash windows, I discovered the current state of window technology. A standard Andersen window, factory-made exactly to the dimensions you want, has superb insulation qualities; superb hinges, crank, and lock; a flick-in, flick-out screen; and it looks great. The same goes for the new kinds of doors, kitchen cabinetry, and even furniture feet that are available — all drastically improved.
…
(New stuff is mostly crap too, of course. But the best new stuff is invariably better than the best old stuff.)
ReWalk is an Israeli-developed exoskeleton suit that gives paraplegics the ability to stand, walk – and even drive. This story has been floating around for a few days (including some typically tasteless Robocop comparisons from UK tabloid news outlets), but m1k3y at grinding.be posted the video and it looked so science fictional – that perfect balance between “wow, check it out” and no-big-deal workaday reality – that I thought it deserved a re-run here:
See what I mean about workaday? The whole atmosphere of the video is low-tech, almost mundane. Perhaps they’re playing down the technological angle for fear of attaching stigma, but it’s about as un-Robocop in style as you could imagine. What will promotional videos for the first commercially available brain-machine interfaces look like?
A bold claim (or maybe not), but evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse thinks he can back it up.
[He] compares the human brain with race horses: Just as horse breeding has selected for long thin legs that increase speed but are prone to fracture, cognitive advances also increase fitness — to a point….
People with aggressive and narcissistic personalities are the easiest to understand evolutionarily; they look out for number one. But even if 16 million men today can trace their genes to Genghis Khan…very few potential despots achieve such heights. Perhaps to check selfish urges, in favor of more probable means to biological success, social lubricants such as empathy, guilt and mild anxiety arose….
But too much emotional acuity — when individuals overanalyze every grimace — can cause a motivational nervousness about one’s social value to morph into a relentless handicapping anxiety.
[Wingnut by Gibna Kebira]
The New York Times has a brief, appreciative item about Vernor Vinge and his novel Rainbows End. Here’s a nice if-this-goes-on snip:
“These people in ‘Rainbows End’ have the attention span of a butterfly,” [Vinge] said. “They’ll alight on a topic, use it in a particular way and then they’re on to something else. Right now people worry that we don’t have lifetime employment anymore. How extreme could that get? I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute.”
[Image: cloudsoup]