Motorcycle riders, also known as “donor bikes” to certain medical professionals of my acquaintance, are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to high speed collisions: they’re not protected by a cage of metal like their SUV-driving brethren. Several companies are looking to right that injustice with jackets that inflate in an accident protecting the motorcyclist’s neck and spine.

Superconductive power cables allow the transmission of power with half as much loss to heat, meaning a superconductive grid wastes a lot less electricity. A Japanese company expects to start installing superconductive cables at the end of 2006.

Share Your OPML looks to be a primitive delicious for XML feeds.

Joseph DeLappe has taken on a unique charge: entering the names of all the American soldiers who have died in Iraq into the online multiplayer game America’s Army. America’s Army is a recruiting and training tool produced by the Army, and populated by people who are having fun virtually killing people. (Which is not at all a condemnation of the behavior: I’m fully in favor of virtual fragfests.) Leads to some interestingly ironic screenshots.

I’m beginning to catch glimpses of a future in which your paycheck comes not from a single employer, or even from a set of clients, but from a cloud of content that you’ve created and spread to the electronic wind. You won’t collect anything particularly consequential for any single bit of content, but in aggregate you’ll be able to put food on the table. Revver is one company looking to make that future happen by appending advertisements to your uploaded video, and sharing the revenue with you.