The SmartS Club

Rats are suffering from bad PR. they are constantly misunderstood, mistreated, mistaken and misplaced if not murdered... The best that is said about them is that they make a wonderful energy-source in your bio-reactor-powered kitchen-table as designed by Auger and Loizeau, a bunch of brilliantly perverted product designers  http://www.auger-loizeau.com  (see our snippet on "my carnivorous computer").Those critters would be a sad bunch were it not for North Star Rescue who organized a massive bailout for thousand cutie-rats that otherwise would have been doomed. Listen: A house-owner in San Jose, CA was driven out of his house by the exponentially proliferating rat-community that started with a single, female rat in a cage (well, you guess it, that lady was pregnant). The good old man was feeding his friends while himself abandoning his house and living in a trailer and everything would have been wonderful wasnt it for that annoying exponentiality inherent to uncontrolled, um...

It is exciting, albeit horrifying at times, to see the servos grab their prey and slowly pull it into the microbial fuel cell. The PC is powered entirely by the electrical energy gained from the biomass. I try to keep my little girl, age 1.5, away from the scene - not only because the impressions might be disturbing to her, but also for her own safety. You are right, you cant get that horrific machine at your local gadget-dealer, yet. But the idea of carnivorous robots is not that far from reality. The design duo James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau has developed some prototypes of bio-energy powered devices like a watch, feeding from flies it catches with a sticky tape or a machine stealing flies from a spider's web. They call them Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots. These guys might be creative, but they are definitely nuts. Or as the Treehuggers write in their review "Brilliant - completely disgusting, but brilliant!" Yep.

After the US ministry of justice has subpoenad Twitter to disclose records of and information on users who might be sympathetic to Wikileaks, Twitter decided to show full cooperation and volunteered to take this one step further. As the US intelligence agencies complain about the difficulties to quickly parse tweets in non-english languages, Twitter will - beginning February 29, 2011 - only accept tweets written in english. Programmers close to the company say they have implemented and tested the necessary parsing software and are comfortable with the speed and smoothness of operation. In a future upgrade it is intended to connect with Googles translation services so that non-english utterances can be transformed into acceptable language on the fly. Negotiations, sources say, are promising.

Everything is said about Wikileaks (and one face behind it). We know now: they are the incarnation of Evil - or the saviour of free speech. No shades of gray. The debate is pure hysteria - on both sides. Imagine a second platform for whistleblowers popping up. That platform, let's call it TheNakedTruth (TNT), co-publishes wikileaks data. It gets tremendous media-attention as it then goes on to reveal a treasure trove of classified cables on international business-connections that some anonymous insider compiled - with rich personal detail on well-known business leaders, evidence for dark paths into government... and documents demonstrating the manipulation of the western free press by shadowy interest groups with ties to rogue states in the east. Just imagine! Some would be shocked, others less surprised by the revelations. But what a discovery! What a public service! A victory for free speach, a glimmer of hope for democracy! Let there be a thousand Wikileaks! All becomes s...

Now to something completely different... Being proud of your brains? Got muscles too? Did you ever think of chess-boxing? The inventor, Iepe Rubingh, performance artist, boxer and a chess-player with an impressive ELO rating of 1850 will 'perform' on Saturday, November 6th 2010 in Berlin . Probably worth a view - and it certainly puts a new spin on the notion of "cultural impact"...

You know it - nano are these strange, probably evil, tiny little thingies, well, yes? No? Maybe? Ask a chemist and he will talk about particles on the nanometer scale (0,000000001m), a pharmacist might emphasize how these nanoparticles can permeate through your skin, the physicist, meanwhile, thinks of semiconductor-structures as you have them in your computer-chips. So, what the heck is Nano? The European Commission is asking you (and me and your neighbour plus some friends - literally everybody) to find a definition of the term "nanomaterial" that the European Commission may use as an overarching, broadly applicable reference term for any EU communication addressing nanomaterials. Any ideas? You may discuss them with us here, or go directly to the EU website. You might help prevent "Nano" from bearing any bias like "Atom" or "Gene".

The times of one-way entertainment are over at Smart-S. We give in to the pressure and open the possibility to comment to everybody. There is a brief review-process to reduce the amount of automated SPAM - so publishing of your input may sometimes be delayed a bit. Don't panic.