Ahh, to have money and live in Berlin… the CarLoft appears to be the height in stylish living.
CarLoft is a pioneering modular loft scheme with a garden and a garage on every floor. All these brand-new luxury flats come with at least one adjacent parking space known as the CarLoggia, reached via the CarLift. When you arrive outside the building, the CarLift recognises your car from the built-in transponder and knows which floor you live on. And still seated inside your car, you’re taken straight to your home in total safety.
Popularity: 8% [?]
A group of 13 notable British doctors and scientists have lashed out at quackery being funded by the National Health Service (NHS). In a letter sent to 476 acute and primary care trusts, the group expressed fears that the NHS is funding “unproven or disproved treatments” like homeopathy, reflexology and aromatherapy. The letter was prompted a speech the Prince Charles, a known nutter and advocate of make-it-up-as-we-go-along science, will be delivering to the World Health Assembly in Geneva.
Signatories of the letter include Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College London, Nobel Prize-winner Sir James Black and Sir Keith Peters, president of the Academy of Medical Science.
Popularity: 8% [?]
You know you’re a confirmed geek if you risk your life using a mobile phone to take a photograph of a truck in pouring rain on the highway, just because the name of the company advertised on the truck is Bork.
Still, bork, hey?
Popularity: 7% [?]
A mail server attempting delivery of a message to Hotmail’s servers receives the following standard legalese:
Connected to: hotmail.be (65.54.244.200 25)
220 bay0-mc7-f8.bay0.hotmail.com Sending unsolicited commercial or bulk e-mail to Microsoft’s computer network is prohibited. Other restrictions are found at http://privacy.msn.com/Anti-spam/. Violations will result in use of equipment located in California and other states.
Now, which equipent would that be? And California, of all places? Is the Governator cooking up a Microsoft-sponsored torture scheme we should know about?
Popularity: 8% [?]
Apologies for not posting for so long, but work and a visit to Austria meant a drastic drop in free time. As proof, a picture of the Tyrolian Alps as seen from the Schwartzee:
More photographs of Tyrol and the Austrian Alps on Flickr.
Popularity: 10% [?]
The GPS navigation system, to my amazement, appears to have been invented in 1909. In an article entitled “Getting There” in the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes:
In 1909, an engineer named J. W. Jones invented a device called the Jones Live-Map, which connected to a car’s odometer. It consisted of a glass-enclosed dial, on which you could place a disk representing a particular trip. The disk had mileage numbers around the perimeter and driving directions printed like spokes on the face. As you progressed down the road, the disk would rotate, telling you where you were and what to do. Live-Map No. 16, for example, guided the “motorist tourist” from Columbus Circle to Waterbury, Connecticut (specifically, the Elton Hotel), telling him, at various intervals, to “take right fork at flag pole,” “pass under trolley arch,” or “caution for dangerous curves.”
Clearly the technology didn’t exist to replicate a modern GPS navigation system, but Jones’s approach sounds similar enough that Garmin might have some prior art to worry about should Jones’s heirs ever cotton on…
Popularity: 7% [?]
