In proximity

My mother has just commanded Dravid to hit a century. Adorable how she sits there in front of the tele yelling at the cricketers. Don’t think India’s going to win though.

Had a meeting today at the Emirates Towers. Very impressive buildings. I'm waiting for the damn Etisalat people to get their act together and deliver me my cable so I can post pictures from my laptop. Too much work installing Hello on here.

Alrighty then, here's your cool news for the day -

Pong invented the Internet not Al Gore. It all began when Steve Russell invented Spacewar which was built at MIT in 1962. Nolan Bushnell became a fan and co-founded Atari in 1972 and let Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak develop Breakout. In summary, former Atari programmers spun off Activision, which merged with Infocom, which was founded by hackers at MIT, which produced consultants Bolt, Beranek and Newman who were contracted to build the Arpanet. Phew! Don’t believe me? Take a look.

When in doubt, call 311 (which, coincidently, happens to be my flat number. Yes, another random piece of information. Deal with it). Impacting the world as only technology can. Brilliant.

There’s something very undeniably cool about giant aquariums. The new DomAquaree Radisson houses the world’s deepest aquarium – the Aquadom (which, btw, would make a really cool name for a game). It’s an 8-storey tank with 50 species of fish. You can take an elevator ride (lasts 7 minutes) through the aquarium. Designed by International Concept Management (of the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay shark tanks fame) who plans to build an even deeper aquarium in Moscow this year.

The robots are coming! The robots are coming! UCLA bioengineers are making machines that grow living muscles on their silicon skeletons (this silicon stuff is everywhere). The robots walk about 2” per hour when immersed in a sugar-water solution. The next step is to add piezoelectric materials to turn electricity into movement and vice versa. Runs as long as the sugar runs out. So I suppose that means that sugar is the future oil. White gold. Wait, isn’t that cocaine? Or not. I’m not exactly up on my drug lingo. You know, along with making robots that now move, they could generate meat for consumption. Not to mention extra human limbs. If I last out long enough, maybe I’ll be able to get me a new pair of feet. Oo, now that would be exciting.

Ok, forget everything I said I’d like to have and put this high up on your ‘things to get Wolfie' list. A waterproof MP3 player. Beats having to listen to the voices in your head. Oregon’s MP120 with 128Mb of flash memory for nearly four hours of swimmingly wonderful tunes. Saw it at RadioShack the other day. Had to bribe the security chap to physically drag me away from it.

The whole Shiavo deal makes me want to puke. That's all I'll say on the subject.

Music for today – the Rock the Casbah album, some Seb Fontaine and some Claude Challe.