CrankyRants.com

CrankyRants.com - No, that’s not a new super round fun robot toy for the kids this holiday season… it’s a car. A vehicle with which you can weave about the highway and swap paint with massive trucks and SUV’s and mini-vans that would gladly eat this little morsel for brunch. 

The Pivo 2, recently unveiled by Japanese manufacturer Nissan, is a battery-powered concept car with a fully rotating cabin that makes going backwards obsolete, since the driver can turn to face the direction they need to go.

Its wheels also turn 90 degrees, making parking easier. In fact it’s practically small enough to bypass parking altogether and simply drive it into your office, onto the elevator… rotating the cabin to discuss the days agenda with co-workers, before pulling out into the hallway and down towards your cube. 

Granted most concept cars rarely make it into production resembling their predecessors, you need only look at the Smart Car on any European street to see that micro-cars like this would do well. Just keep in mind that most truck drivers will register only minor annoyance at the spilled coffee resulting from the slight kerkunk of your mobile speed-bump passing cleanly beneath their 18 wheels of steel.

Passenger-side airbag though. So that’s a plus.

CrankyRants.com - The title could stand on it’s own, but if you’re interested in the details, apparently scientists at the University of Washington are genetically altering trees to pull toxins out of contaminated ground water. Not necessarily the quicker-picker-upper, these trees and plants spend years absorbing the bad stuff through their root system and turn them into I’m guessing some form of grotesque glowing mutant tree leaves or something. Remember the “Kite Eating Tree” from the old Charlie Brown cartoons? Big tree? Giant creepy smile? Lot’s of childhood tree nightmares that resulted? That’s what it’s like.

The relatively new field of phytoremediation is the cause for the new discoveries. Through a plant’s natural ability to extract chemicals from water, soil, and air, specific trees and plants are being bio-engineered to extract specific forms of chemical by-products and waste. Great idea. Horrible dilemma for your typical environmentalist.

“Love that we’re cleaning up the toxins here… but icky water make tree cry!”

Inc.com has posted their latest list of Top 30 Coolest Young Entrepreneurs in America. Their criteria? Gotta be rich and cool and under 30.

Bummer.

It’s bad enough trying to start your day in the tech industry as it is. But to settle into your morning newspaper site with a warm cup of Diet Mt. Dew, only to find out that you have failed on possibly 2 of the 3 items required to check off your “Coolest Young Entrepreneurs in America” checklist before the sun has even risen? Depressing .

Hell, the mere proximity to any form of diet product and usage at anytime, day or night, of an exclamation referring to the process or state of being “bummed” are reasons enough to make it a clean-failure-sweep on that particular list.

Makes the morning task list just that much more unbearable. Still have my fingers crossed for their next installment, “Top 30-Something Losers With Projects That May Someday Earn Back Their Domain Reg Fee” list.

Don’t feel like waiting the few weeks to get an iPhone? Feel a little queasy about pumping more smugness into Apple’s already bloated sense of self by giving them a ton of money for little more than an ipod with a speaker?

Then you need to check out the newest phone from HTC, the “HTC Touch”, released Wednesday to T-Mobile customers. Sporting a 2.8-inch, 320-by-240, 65K-color touch screen and Windows Mobile 6, the HTC Touch offers many of the snazzy finger sweeps and swoops touted by Jobs and the iPhone as “groundbreaking”.

With the HTC Touch, a user can scroll through contacts, songs, or documents with simple finger movements, and can easily sync tunes and files with Windows Media Player and Vista systems.

No doubt Apple will find some way of suing for infringement of the technology that they rightfully stole themselves. Of course, Apple has a way of doing that. Xerox Parc point-and-click interface ring a bell, Stevie?

We’ve all seen the newest head-slapper spark across the network in Twitter.com, and have wondered along with “why didn’t I think of that” the similar but more important question… “why the hell is that so popular?”

For those who haven’t experienced it, Twitter is a mini-blog. A tool to tell the world what you are doing every minute of your day.

“I’m writing a wicked-cool SQL statement right now!”

“I like my raisin bagel. A Lot!”

“I wish my cat wouldn’t look so sad when I eat my raisin bagel and not give her any!”

…and so-forth. This is what we’ve come to. For those who don’t want to go the LifeCasters route like Justin.TV and his Truman-Show side show, there is Twitter. Here’s the catch, though. Unless you are signed up with friends who care about you and your eating habits… no one will ever see it. The content isn’t really worthy of indexing by reputable search engines, so it is literally the same thing as opening your car window on the way home from work and shouting to the busy highway… “I stapled 20 sets of documents today! Wooo!”

The guy in the semi next to you might hear you, and might even alter his personal life… changed forever by your impassioned exclamations. Or he might just return to his cheeseburger dinner and roll the windows up.

For the tens of thousands who are now regular Twitterheads, it’s a spiritual experience and there is no swaying them from their path. And thanks to cool tools like TwitterVision and TwitterTroll.com, the anonymous can be immortalized, if no more than for a few seconds or a few days. But in the end you have to wonder who has the patience and stamina to keep up with the work after the novelty has worn off. Find out at www.twitter.com/crankyrants. I’ll bet it doesn’t take long.
 

Microsoft Corp. is set to officially release the “Surface”, a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects. Kind of like Minority Report, but with a reduced chance of the photos merging to reveal personal visions of yourself murdering anyone.

The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn’t currently marketing the device to the family crowd, but will instead focus on the corporate workplace where the demand for push and slide photo-technology is, most likely, staggeringly high.

Yes, this is what life is like when you’re a mom. Waiting on your kids every move… bored out of your skull and counting the days before they move out of the damn house. 

Happy Mother’s Day, dammit.

The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at the age 93.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

But he downplayed his role when asked if he felt his invention helped raise a new generation of couch potatoes.

“People ask me all the time — ‘Don’t you feel guilty for it?’ And I say that’s ridiculous,” he said. “It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television.”

Some respctful jokes for the funeral may include the following:

“Guess his batteries… just sort of ran out, poor guy.”

“His picture looks good. Can you get up and change it for me?”

“Have you seen Robert anywhere?” - “Check under the coffin lid over there.”

Lasers beamed from space have detected what researchers have long suspected: big sloshing lakes of water underneath Antarctic ice.

These lakes, some stretching across hundreds of square miles (km), fill and drain so dramatically that the movement can be seen by a satellite looking at the icy surface of the southern continent, glaciologists reported in Thursday’s editions of the journal Science.

So… I’m no scientist or anything. But I’ve seen enough James Bond movies to know that if there’s anything giant space laser are best at… it’s melting stuff. Anyone in the research team ever think to ask “Hey guys? Are we sure all of that under-ice water wasn’t just ice before we started pointing our giant laser blaster at it?”

Seems to me that would have been the first question asked… followed closely by “How’s progress coming on the research into the melting ice-caps from our Giant Direct-light Space Toaster?”

You’ll find jobs in London at Canary Wharf Jobs.com.

If professor Ray McAllister could perfect his time-machine technology… he’d send a note back to his 1972 self that simply read: “Tire reef. Dont!”

Back in the heady days of disco, cocaine, and environmental research, professor McCallister and a team of fellow oceanic engineers decided something needed to be done to help promote new coral activity and underwater wildlife growth. The solution? Strap tens of thousands of old tires together and sink them off the coast of Florida.

The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.

Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some of the tires that were bundled together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against a nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.

“The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area. It just didn’t work that way,” said Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University who was instrumental in organizing the project. “I look back now and see it was a bad idea.”

Give the guy credit for admitting he was wrong, I suppose. But clearly every member of that team needs to strap on a speedo and snorkel and commence to floating that 30 year old science experiment back to the surface. At least we now know a little more about tires. Can’t burn’em. Can’t drown’em. Those things are strong.