David Lidsky's Blog, page 4807

Nintendo DS in Classrooms to Help Japanese Schoolkids Find the Square Root of Mario

Ninteno's guru Shigeru Miyamoto has just revealed that Nintendo might be aiming at a surprising new market for its games consoles: Schools. With all the controversy about distractions and violence, is this sensible?

Miyamoto's words came during an interview with the AP. While dodging questions about the future of the Wii, and how he thinks about competitor consoles (particularly relevant now Sony's PlayStation Move is on the way) he noted that getting Nintendo products in use in an...

Why the Bipartisan Proposal for Biometric ID Cards Will Probably Fail

A pair of senators, one red, one blue, have today proposed a biometric ID system to "mend" immigration. It's part of a bipartisan immigration bill backed by President Obama, and proposes to replace everyone's social security cards with one that stores biometric information about the individual. But just how practical is the proposal? Perhaps it's worth casting a look at similar proposals in Britain.

This is how the ID card proposals have evolved in the U.K. Governing party outlines its...

Cardboard Record Sleeve Turns Into Record Player

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Good news for anyone who has old records but no record player: you can make your own record player pretty easily--just add cardboard. Griffiths, Gibson and Ramsay Productions (GGRP), a Vancouver-based sound design studio, exploited the idea in a direct mail marketing piece.

The company created a record player from a corrugated cardboard envelope that can hold a 45 rpm record in place. Just spin it with a pencil, and voila, vibrations pass through the needle to generate a recording of a...

FCC's Broadband Measuring Tool Gets 150,000 Takers, Shows West-Coast Bias

A week after the FCC debuted a beta tool for consumers to measure their broadband speeds, we've got the first set of stats. 150,000 people decided to avail themselves of the widget, available on Android, iPhone and Web platforms, giving the commission a more realistic idea of the state of the U.S.'s Internet connections than the figures bandied about by the ISPs. The FCC also announced that it would be conducting a hardware-based scientific study of broadband connections on tens of...

DARPA's Smart Blimp: Mysterious, Hovering Future of Battlefield Surveillance

In the future DARPA's ISIS blimp may be hovering above the horizon near to conflict zones, feeding real time radar data to troops and smart weapons from on high. True to its name, it's also a little more magical than the Goodyear blimp as it's almost totally automated.

In fact, the Integrated Sensor Is the Structure has almost nothing in common with the Goodyear aircraft apart from its shape and helium-filling. It's designed to take off from a permanent ground base in the U.S. and fly...

Open Source Washing Machine Project Rethinks Clothes-Washing

Most of us don't think about the cultural context of our washing machines--we just toss in clothes, turn on the device, and don't ponder it further. But the reality is that the majority of people on the planet wash clothes by hand, mostly because of poverty and lack of available resources. Enter the Open Source Washing Machine Project, which rethinks the way we wash clothes based on economical, sociological, cultural and environmental conditions.

From the project Web site:

Here in rich...

How Cheap Could Computing Get: Free? NComputing Thinks So

If you assume a desktop computer's a big box full of chips, hard drives and other paraphernalia, it's hard to see how to make it cheaper. Unless you go down the virtualization route: NComputing thinks the ultimate cost could be zero.

Ncomputing makes powerful chips that make thin clients work: Essentially turning a keyboard, mouse, monitor and small box of electronics into a fully-functioning powerful Windows or Linux PC, with its real complex "guts" in a different location accessed over a...

Top Designers Strut Their Flatware at "Cannes of Tabletop," DIFFA's Dining Extravaganza

Film maker John Waters famously dubbed the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA)'s annual fund-raiser, "Dining by Design," the "Cannes of Tabletop." And with good reason. If these tables could walk, they would have been at home strolling the red carpet at the Palais des Festivals, dressed to kill. Such design heavy-hitters as David Rockwell, David Stark, Vincente Wolf, Joseph Carini, and Michael Tavano put their talent where their heart is this week by ponying up designs for...

Now Screening: Spike Jonze's New Film for Absolut

Jonze's experimental, branded short film is out now on the web, and here's an interview with its executive producers.

Today, Spike Jonze's new movie for Absolut Vodka, I Am Here, is finally available for everyone to see on the Web. It's beautifully shot, and worth a look. And if you're interested in some context about why Jonze ever agreed to direct what's essentially a commerical turned short film, read our short profile of the project below....

Fresh from Where the Wild Things Are, Spike...

Eye Candy: British Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010 Is Part Cleopatra Jones, Part Pinhead

Unlike middling entries from the U.S. and Canada, Thomas Heatherwick's British pavilion rocks.

The Boston Globe's totally sweet photo blog, the Big Picture, has a new entry up covering the Shanghai Expo. It kicks off May 1, and construction on the pavilions is wrapping up. We've seen the renderings, and covered a few of the major fails (as well as a couple past successes), but now we can finally see the pavilions in the flesh.

The clear stand-out is Thomas Heatherwick's British pavilion, a...