Category Archives: innovation

Vertical farming – interesting idea

This is an article about an idea called vertical farming. Basically, the idea is to build high rise buildings for in-door farming. Like massive greenhouses on steroids. They would like to build urban indoor farms in order to meet man kinds increasing food needs.

The vertical farming website lists several advantages to this plan:

  • Year-round crop production
  • No reliance on weather conditions
  • Indoor crops would require far less in the way of pesticides, etc
  • Return farmland to nature (I don’t think that this would actually happen).
  • The (significant) energy costs of transporting foods to urban centers is also avoided

They are designing the things to produce their own energy so that they are totally self-sufficient. They reckon very little water would be lost (they even want to capture evaporation).

One question that I have is where will all the top-soil come from? And wouldn’t the nutrients in the soil become depleted? Lots of fertilizer.

Anyway, I think that it’s an interesting idea.


Youg web millionaires

This is an article about an elite group of young guys who have made it seriously big on the internet. Many of them got going in their teens and are now seriously rich and famous in their 20’s.

They are undoubtedly talented, but also a little lucky. They were in the right place at the right time, but they were able to take the chance when it came. Yes I suppose I am a little jealous…

Thing is, these guys are a bit like movie stars. Out of the thousands that try, only a few lucky people really make it big – many talented people fail. It’s a risky goal, but if you win, you win big.

For instance Mark Zuckerberg who is more than a year younger than me (he is 23) started and runs Facebook – a great, great website which I often use. Facebook is one of the 20 most often visited sites in the world and has more than 25 million registered users.

Bionic eye

This Economist article is about a technology being developed which can restore some sight to people who are blind. In a certain type of blindness, the nerve that takes information from the eye to the brain is OK, it’s just the cells on the retina which collect light that are problematic.

The researchers implanted a chip with basically a digital camera in it and connected the chip to the patient’s optical nerve. There are only 1240 sensors on the chip compared to the 120 million in a healthy eye, but results were still exciting:

“Patients reported being able to distinguish between dark walls and a light window, and a dark table and white plates. The image was coarse compared with normal vision because of the small number of pixels, and the patients did not see fully in colour, although they reported being able to distinguish white, grey and yellow tones. Nevertheless, enough sight was restored to make a difference to each of the volunteers’ lives.”

Satellite images of atrocities

Check out this link to some satellite photos showing atrocities happening in Africa. They show before and after satellite photo’s proving that some villages are getting hammered. I suppose this could be as a result of accidents, but I doubt it.

This example is a village in Chad.  You can use the old village outlines or the river in the top left to see that this is the same area.

Some mad stuff is going on in the world…

More on Google Street Views

A few days ago I posted on Google Street Views. I still think that this is an awesome innovation.

  • Here is the link to the official Google demo showing what it’s all about.
  • Here is a link from the normally excellent Wired magazine to an article attacking Street Views from a privacy perspective.

I still feel like all of these privacy arguments smack of alarmist propaganda. Think about the arguments, come up with something logical and structured, and then complain. Don’t just panic and react emotionally. Get over it

Cat-cam is one of the coolest things I’ve seen

Cat camThis German guy decided to rig a little camera onto the collar of his cat to see what it gets up to:

“I thought about our cat who is the whole day out, returning sometimes hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he stay also the night out. When he finally returns, I wonder where he was and what he did during his day. This brought me to the idea to equip the cat with a camera. The plan was to put a little camera around his neck which takes every few minutes a picture. After he is returning, the camera would show his day.”

So he got going on his pet project which is now underway. He discusses how he struggled to develop a protective casing for the camera. His first few attempts didn’t work too well:

“This time the part returned – dirty and scratched outside, water inside. What the hell is the cat doing !?”

Eventually he got a working model going and put it onto the cat’s collar:

“The reaction was not very happy but finally accepted.”

Now he has a site up on which he posts pics of his cat’s “trips”. There are some great pics, and some pretty mysterious ones. Also fun captions on each of them. I recommend taking a look.

Google Street View – awesome and get over the privacy

You may know that Google offers quite a cool map service. It has satellite imagery of most of the earth, as well as good road maps, etc. Pretty cool to check out a satellite image of your house. For instance this is the building that I am currently sitting in:

Recently they added a really cool feature called Street Views. They got some cars with about 10 cameras mounted on the roof and cruised around some big american cities. Now when you are in Google Maps you can get a look at what you would see if you were on the ground (only in those cities though).

This is pretty freaky because now you can see individual people. For instance one woman found her flat and could see her cat looking out of the window! I think it’s awesome and I wish that we had it in Cape Town. People see you walking around all the time – now there is a permanent record. It’s not the end of the world – get over it.

Here is a site dedicated to interesting sightings in Street Views. My favorite so far is this one which captures a small car crash in progress:

RSS explained

RSS logoYou have probably seen the logo on the left all over the internet – trust me, its all over the place. It’s the RSS logo, and when you see it you know that the site you are reading supports one of the most useful standards evolving on the internet.

So, what is RSS?

RSS is a standard format used to let people (and programs) know about updates to a website. Because it is a standard (everyone agrees on a common format) programs can be written to do useful things with RSS publications – more about that later.

An example

This site actually has an RSS feed. You can see a link to it at the bottom of the page – “Entries (RSS)“. The link is to a file in a standard format (XML) which has information about the 10 most recent articles published on alistairpott.com. For each article there is a title, link, and description (in my case the whole article).

RSS readers – Google Reader

This is where RSS becomes useful to you and I. There are lots of RSS tools and readers out there, but the one that I use and recommend is Google Reader. Instead of manually checking each of my favorite sites for updates I just open up Google Reader. It downloads the RSS file from each of the sites I have subscribed to and lets me know if there are any updates that I haven’t seen yet. I can then read the articles from within the program – or link to the original articles if I want. Below is an example of a recent alistairpott.com post shown in Google Reader.

alistairpott.com in Google Reader If you regularly visit sites to check for updates, then I strongly recommend that you give Google Reader a try. And if you do, then subscribe to alistairpott.com!

Cars running on compressed air to be produced by Tata

Compressed air city carGizmag have an article on a car which Tata is going to produce which runs on compressed air.  This means the only impact on the environment is the energy used to actually compress the air.  The exhaust fumes are just cool, unpolluted air!

The company says that the car will cost about R30 to fill up at air pumps at upgraded petrol stations.  It will then be able to travel 200 to 300 km with a max speed of about 110 km/h.

If this actually works it will be great for cities.  Almost no pollution and cheap to run.