The latest elevator news from the Wall Street Journal. The acceleration of elevators is tailored to the city. “In a high-rise in New York, they want to feel the acceleration,” says Ray Moncini, president of Otis North America. But in Japan, people like a smooth ride. And elevators have apparently become the latest place to hold people captive while they endure the assault of media. I guess the Muzak wasn’t enough.

Following its rebirth, Iridium has been doing well. In addition to their government contracts, deals with private firms have been increasing and now make up about half of their revenue. Their data transmission business is pulling a lot of weight and the company could have broke even this year had they not decided instead to invest in creating short-message service. But they are facing a dilemma. Iridium is required to sign a contract to build and launch a new batch of satellites, even though they don’t need them until 2012. This is a regulation from the FCC to guarantee their commitment to use a reserved set of airwaves. Unfortunately, the satellite business is shifting to the ground. Competitor ICO, who had also struggled to survive, is turning to a terrestrial solution to cover more area and even bring broadband service to rural locations. Iridium could alter their satellite model to take advantage of on-ground repeaters as well, but they’ll need to ask for flexibility from the government to keep their money from being tied up in this federally enforced contract.

Johnjoe MacFadden’s “cemi field theory” proposes that “human consciousness is actually the brain’s electromagnetic field interacting with its circuitry.” Author of Quantum Evolution, McFadden’s emphasis on the electromagnetic field as an entity that defines the human mind, rather than a side effect, as it were, of how our brains happen to work, is likely to be controversial. But there are benefits to his line of inquiry and potential experimentation to discover if he’s correct. Even if he can not prove scientifically that this wireless field is what makes us conscious and human, finding the effects of magnetic fields on the brain may be helpful in treating those whose minds are not wired as properly as they could be. Hopefully it won’t be as rash as shock therapy, but there is so much we don’t understand about how our brains function that a new perspective is welcome. The article notes that McFadden’s approach brings back philosophy of mind’s dualism, although in a slightly different manner from the original.

The NY Times article on exhibitors at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair is chock-full of nifty links to funky furniture designers. Fold Online has interesting wall-hangings and furniture with dramatic wood grain. Truck Product Architecture brings their name to life with pieces that are easy to ship, functional and appealing in minimalism. They were hoping to sell to Design Within Reach, a retailer looking for new items. Blu Dot was showing their stacking storage systems.
Lolah has funky, whimsical shapes. C-Design Studio‘s pieces seem boxy. R&D; Design gets my vote with simple designs in interesting forms. They have a circular steel table laser-cut into a lace pattern. It’s named Doily.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are the front-runner for replacing bar codes in grocery stores. The little tags can transmit an electronic product code to a wireless receiver, speeding up scanning, and making the inventory process almost automatic. They still need to work out a standard method of communication and bring the cost down from 50 cents to 5 cents per tag, but the Auto-ID Center researchers believe that is possible by 2005. The technology was developed by a joint team from MIT and Cambridge University (bridging the ocean that separates the two Cambridges). Radio tags are already used in many applications, including library security (low frequency) and toll-collection (high frequency). When they become standard for tracking all sorts of products, perhaps they will also help you find your keys.

Perhaps you would have enjoyed living in the windows of Harrods for a week, your activities on view to passersby and Internet webcams. Mostly, though, you would be demonstrating how wonderful the LG Electronics appliances are, since they are the sponsors of this odd publicity stunt. Four unrelated people were picked to portray a happy family (or as happy as a family can be when they don’t really know each other and are forced to spend 9 hours together each day on display in a department store window). They seem to be spending their time learning about feng shui, meeting minor celebrities, getting makeovers, and, ah yes, using those all-important appliances. I wonder what it would be like if my refrigerator got email. (via Nobody’s Fool: What’s for dinner?)

Grocery shoppers in the U.K. will soon be able to bring home purple carrots. Next year the selection will include black and white and more colors. On this side of the pond, a Texas grower has been selling a carrot that was created to match Texas A&M;’s colors (maroon and white). Those were found to contain more vitamin A and 40% more beta-carotene. Not bad. Over at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they started looking into creating carrots with the aim of improving human health. The various colors of carrot contain different helpful chemicals. Red carrots have lycopene, which has exhibited antioxidant properties in studies on tomatoes. Purple carrots have anthocyanins, which is the same pigment that you see in fall leaves and blueberries. I call blueberries “cancer pills” (prevention, not cause!). The anthocyanins neutralize free radicals. Even pigment-less white carrots have phytochemicals.

You could imagine that escaping gravity would be a dancer’s dream, or at least a flight of fancy. Well, dancers with the Gravity Zero project are getting the chance to whirl about without the bonds that keep us tethered to the ground. It is for the benefit of science, an initiative to study the difference in dancers’ control of their limbs and posture. Parabolic flights take the subjects through minutes of zero gravity while transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) measures how the messages of movement are transmitted through the subjects’ muscles. This information will help patients recovering from neurotrauma and also astronauts who have to live in zero-G for extended periods.

Just as there is the popular Internet Movie Database, there is the Internet Broadway Database which contains data about actors, shows, and theaters.

The Computer History Museum at Moffett Field in Mountain View is getting some publicity now as they are fundraising for a new building. The museum opened in 1999 in a creaky old warehouse that can showcase only a tenth of their collection. Much of it was actually the archives of the old Computer Museum in Boston which became focused on educating people about how computers worked instead of exhibiting the history. That museum eventually merged into Boston’s Museum of Science and the collection of artifacts was moved to Silicon Valley. As visitors examine the evolution of the device from huge to tiny, some wonder what will happen next as chips become ubiquitous.