Memex 1.1

Hmmm… From today’s Telegraph: golf buggies with sat-nav for players lacking direction .

Each of the £4,000 golf buggies comes complete with a sat-nav system which is programmed with a map of West Midlands Golf Club.

The hi-tech devices mean members could do away with caddies altogether as the buggies’ computers tell players how far they have hit a drive and what distance remains to the hole.

But even these capabilities do not supersede the buggies’ most important function - being able to order a drink remotely from the bar.

John Harrhy, 65, co-owner of the club in the Forest of Arden, near Solihull, explained what led him to introduce the 25-strong fleet.

He said: “We like to think we are a forward-looking golf business. We had been looking around at ways to progress and considered a number of buggy models. They are very popular with the senior members, who are offered them at a cheaper rate, and with visiting golf societies. You can enter your scorecard on the on-board machine and it knows which other buggies are in your group.’

The funny thing is that none of the players who will eagerly embrace this technology can hit the ball far enough to get lost.

Well, blow me down! The Daily Torygraph reports that:

Men find photos of the opposite sex much more “rewarding” than women, new research claims today.

According to the study men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female form as they do from having a curry or making money whereas women do not take any significant reward from looking at pictures of men.

The survey published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B said that brain scan studies show that “reward centres” are triggered in men when they gaze at a woman’s face or body whereas they are not in females…

Reward centres, eh? Now that’s what I call leading-edge research. (Or should that read ‘world class’? I’m always getting the two mixed up.)

Er, you just stick it in the ground. Ideal for picnicking drinkers. $7.95 from Crate & Barrel.

If you find someone whirling his/her new Apple laptop around and are wondering why, look no further.

Thanks to Bill Thompson, whose laptop is too ancient to be serviceable in this way. Thankfully, so is mine!

En passant… I overheard a conversation recently in which people were talking about the government’s policy on so-called “Faith-based” schools. One mother said ruefully that her little darling had declared that the only faith-based establishment he was willing to attend was a Jedi school.

Later… Quentin (who has one of the fancy new MacBookPro machines) writes:

I can confirm that this works as advertised, and should be a source of concern to any companies who insure laptops :-)

Reminds me of a sign I saw once in a US petrol station….

Duct tape is like the Force
It has a light side, and a dark side
And it binds the universe together.

Hmmm… Another wacky MIT Media Lab Project…

Lover’s Cups explore the idea of sharing feelings of drinking between two people in different places by using cups as communication interfaces of drinking. Two cups are wireless connected to each other with sip sensors and LED illumination. The Lover’s cups will glow when your lover is drinking.

When both of you are drinking at the same time, both of the Lover’s Cups glow and celebrate this virtual kiss.

Bet they’re not dishwasher-safe.

After all, everyone else has a mobile phone nowadays. But wait! — help is on its way. Due for release in March 2006, apparently. I expect the cats will want them next. Sigh.

Photo shows our good friend Rolo, who labours under the delusion that phone calls can be made with a slipper.

… and get one of these.

It’s a Yamaha EZ AG. Each fret has six illuminated microswitches which, when depressed, simulates the sound of a string being pressed at that location. If you want to learn, then the device will ‘play’ a desired riff, lighting up the relevant switches/frets as it goes. Quentin and I found it when buying audio kit at Digital Village. I left him in charge of it while I went to pay. As I was signing the credit card chit, what should I hear but the opening bars of Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’, played expertly.

Someone (Gordon Brown?) should give one of these to Tony Blair when he steps down from Number 10. After all, he used to be an air guitarist before he took up politics. A snip at £149.99!

Well, here’s what it says:

Color Code is a full-color portrait of the English language.
The artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.

No — not another post complaining about Microsoft, but about an online version of the board game that has sparked a million family rows on wet holiday afternoons. There are 18 London cabs equipped with GPS and every time one traverses a piece of London that an online gamer ‘owns’ s/he collects revenue. Clever idea, but…

(Thinks… what’s to stop the cabbies playing themselves? At least in the board game the pieces are driven by throws of the dice and don’t have motives of their own!)

Not really. Just a pic from a curious Japanese site explaining how to bullet-proof your iPod. Nice metalwork, though. Thanks to Dave Hill for the link.