Books and Technology

Revenge: Shakespeare-Style

“IF YOU PRICK US DO WE NOT BLEED? IF YOU TICKLE US DO WE NOT LAUGH? IF YOU POISON US DO WE NOT DIE? AND IF YOU WRONG US SHALL WE NOT REVENGE?” - William Shakespeare It started innocently enough. Edd Joseph was in the market for a PlayStation 3 (PS3) and took to the internet to find one. He found one for £80 and sent off the money to the seller. The PS3 never showed up and Joseph got pissed. To revenge the failed transaction Joseph began texting the complete works of Shakespeare to the seller. Yep, the complete works, all...

Continue Reading →

Will this new metal ink transform the eBook experience?

Figure 6. (a) Optical image of a conductive pen loaded with a conductive Cu nanosheet ink. (b) Optical image of drawn conductive electronic art. (c) Optical image of a flexible paper display containing an LED array on paper.  A new report from a group of Chinese scientists just might hold the key needed to propel e-reading to a whole new level. In the study, "metal ink was found to exhibit very interesting properties as a printing ink on flexible electronics, especially on paper substrates because it is environment friendly, recyclable, foldable, and lightweight." Figure 5. Simulation images (a1–c1), SEM images of...

Continue Reading →

Sandy Hook propels Melbourne man to invent a bullet-proof bookcase

[youtube]http://youtu.be/pCY0kd9KMIg[/youtube] Craig Harwood  and his 11 year-old daughter were watching the events at Sandy Hook elementary school play out on television when she turned to him and said, "'Dad, can't you invent something to stop this from happening?'" That was all Harwood, who was a  a special operations and anti-terrorism police officer, needed to get to work. While the US gun lobby called for teachers to be armed, Mr Harwood thought about how to protect people from gunmen in the terrifying wait for police to arrive. The business partners hit on dFence - a movable bookcase fitted with three anti-ballistic layers that can...

Continue Reading →

Code Poetry: Bits and Verse for the Software set

Talk about creative programming. Submissions are now being accepted for the Code Poetry Slam 1.1 At the Slam, finalists presented work ranging from human language poems incorporating concepts and gestures from programming, to poems written entirely in compilable code. They were invited to present their poems in whatever way they saw fit, and performed with various techniques, including poems composed and compiled in an IDE, multimedia audio/visual presentations, and straight readings from a notebook. The slam, sponsored  Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University, looks for "code that is beautiful to read and simultaneously executable." This was the winning  poem from...

Continue Reading →