Category: Sci/Tech

Long-time Street Techies should know that we got our name from the William Gibson quote: “The street finds its own uses for things.” Street Tech patron muse Kevin Kelly, former Whole Earth editor, co-creator of Wired, and recently of Cool Tools, has a new site that was also inspired by the Gibson quote. Street Uses looks at the way that technology trickles down, gets used, abused, and hacked to neccessity. The caption for this entry reads:

” It would be hard to find a better example of “street use” than these hardened street trucks outfitted for desert war. A guy named Defensor Fortis, who was stationed in Iraq, posted some photos on Flickr of truck modifications performed by contractors. These are desperate attempt to protect a factory-issue truck from roadside bombs or enemy fire. They also boast their own artillery posts to return fire. When asked about the effectiveness of the jury-rigged armor Defensor said, “I have seen no proof, but I imagine they’re fairly safe from small arms fire and more than like fitted with “run flat” tires.”

[Via Boing Boing]

This one could go in our “Why Didn’t Someone Already Think of That?” File. An Israeli inventor, Eliyahu Nir, has come up with a way of getting people out of the windows of burning buildings by using a spiral-tube slide which can be raised and lowered on an extendible boom.

We won’t go so far as to say that it could make fire escaping fun, but it’s certainly a lot less frightening than having to jump onto a inflatable bull’s eye or being pulled up into a helicopter.

A Street Tech reader hipped us to this Reuters story about an amazing bed designed and built by Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars:

“[He] took inspiration for the bed — a sleek black platform, which took six years to develop and can double as a dining table or a plinth — from the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 cult film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.'”

The bed is held in place by strong magnetic forces from magnets in the floor below and magnets in the Monolith…er… bed.

I like this last paragraph:

“Although people with piercings should have no problem sleeping on the bed, Ruijssenaars advises them against entering the magnetic field between the bed and the floor. They could find their piercing suddenly tugged toward one of the magnets.”

I guess you want to make sure you take your belt off before getting near the bed, too.

[Thanks, Ron!]

CNet has a nifty
photo piece, from the BlackHat security event, showing the innards of the BlueBag, a drive-by Bluetooth sniffing and attack device. Here’s the deep caption accompanying this image:

“Luca Carettoni (left) and Claudio Merloni are security consultants at Milan, Italy-based Secure Network. The two created the BlueBag to raise awareness about the potential of attacks against Bluetooth-enabled devices, they said in an interview at the Black Hat security event in Las Vegas.

‘The BlueBag is a roll-aboard suitcase filled with hardware. That gear is loaded with software to scan for Bluetooth devices and launch attacks against those, the two men said.

“We started evaluating how Bluetooth technology was spread in a metropolitan area,” Carettoni said. “We went around airports, offices and shopping malls and realized that a covered bag can be used quite effectively for malicious purposes.”

Okay, this isn’t really a how-to item, but it may be one day, if a Scottish theoretical physicist has his way. Dr. Ulf Leonhardt, of St. Andrews University in Scotland, believes that invisibility is possible via the optical technique of bending light around an object (such as you in a cape and a spandex suit):

“Leonhardt uses the example of water circling around a stone. The water flows in, swirls around the stone and then leaves as if nothing was there. ‘If you replace the water with light then you would not see that there was something present because the light is guided around the person or object. You would see the light coming from the scenery behind as if there was nothing in front,” he said.”

Dr. Leonhardt describes the physics behind the theoretical devices that could create such invisibility in the current New Journal of Physics. It is a follow-up to an earlier study he published in the journal Science

[Via /.].

If you’ve ever wondered what might happen if SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) actually did detect alien signals from space, one scenario might be that certain concerns would not want such information to come to light. Well, according to some in the conspiracy community, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. Allegations are flying through cyberspace faster than an out-of-control Area-51 black budget aircraft that SETI discovered a high concentration of signals from a certain area of space, and an unidentified group has stepped in to block those signals, AND SETI has covered up the whole business. Sound far-fetched. Probably. The person doing the whistle-blowing runs a sort of rival alien signal sleuth group (CSETI) and has apparently made similar accusations against SETI in the past. You can read more about the current “controversy” here.

DailyTech has a piece about a fascinating phone recycling technology that Nokia has developed for “deconstructing” old phones. Normally, when phones are reclaimed, it takes several minutes to take a phone apart to recycle its components. This tech would do it, hands-off, in two seconds, using heat. The technology to enable this uses Shape-Memory Alloy. Application of high heat (between 60-150C) causes the SMA to “actuate” and release the parts. Nokia insists this wouldn’t lead to cell phones that reduce themselves to a pile o’ parts in a hot car.

New Scientist has a fascinating piece about a controversial theory at odds with the idea of black holes. This alternative theory recently got a boost, thanks to some observations during a rare cosmological coincidence, conditions which allowed scientists to probe deeper into a quasar than ever before. What they found was very different than what has been previously theorized (namely a black hole at its center).

Read what they found here.

It sounds like one of Firesign Theater’s many wacky car companies (Aleister Crowley’s Used Cars, Medieval Motors, Jailbird Motors), but apparently, Tesla Motors is real and planning on selling this all-electric roadster. Here are some stats (claimed by the makers):

* 100% Electric
* 0 to 60 in 4 seconds
* 135mpg equivalent
* 250 miles per charge
* About 1 cent/mile

This is the car company that Elon Musk of PayPal, Sergey Brin of eBay, Larry Page of Google, and Jeff Skoll (formerly of eBay) are behind, making it the first Silicon Valley car company. And true to its computer tech roots, this car runs on 6,831 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, the same type used in your laptop. Crazy. Read Joshua Davis’s piece from Wired on the company.

Thanks, Ron!

Om Malik has a link on GigaOm to a report on dropping VoIP quality. He writes:

“Brix Networks, a company that develops monitoring tools for VoIP, says that the quality of VoIP calls is getting worse… nearly 20% of VoIP calls have unacceptable quality…”

Damn, and just when I was thinking of switching to Vonage…

Read the rest of Om’s piece here.