The SmartS Club

When I fire up my web-based email account late at night, I get a predictable selection of 'consumer suggestions'. Today it got scary. "One million singles are waiting for you!" - it doesn't get more frightening than that! Imagine, one percent of them camping out in front of your house. It's hard to explain to the neighbours, let alone your spouse - and outright unforgivable to the omnipresent neighbouress, who has her eyes everywhere and her thoughts dependably focused on the worst. It made my rant-in-progress (whining about the abusive way of oversimplified popularisation of science by Michio Kaku - again) collaps and left me stunned, occupied, worried. As advice-literature is the straw to hold onto in difficult situations, I recall what always helps me to activate the neurons in times of blank: adrenalin. I am not too fond of externally adding chemicals to my body - and my love to syringes is limited - so I fall back to sports: 5 chin-ups, 10 push-ups, ...

I am not the person who get's to go places. Usually I am sitting in a damp office somewhere one or two floors below the basement of an unbelievably ugly office-building. So I don't have to think whom I could ask to water my plants. Which is good, because I neither have plants to water nor friends to ask. But you might. And you certainly solved that problem. But you know what? Your plant also needs light - sunlight if possible. Will you ask your neighbours to move the Hibiscus around your apartment while the sunlight wooshes through? No, you say, watering will have to do it.  But there are people thinking seriously about that problem - and thinking hard they solved it.  I bumped into those guys when I rediscovered the treehuggers. I had almost forgotten them. Treehuggers, you say? I know. Me too. BUT. There is this one website, that I once ran into, when I read about the carnivorous robots that get their energy from digesting anything from fruitflies to your favo...

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.