I’m very glad I saw this article about the ultra-revealing search x-ray they are using at U.S. Customs. Now I know what I could be up against if I ever was suspected of smuggling items. “BodySearch scans are so sharp that the shape of a person’s navel is visible, along with the shapes of other, more private parts.” The manufacturer says it’s less invasive than a strip search, but it is certainly more eerie to me that someone could save images of all of me. Unless they videotape strip searches, which they certainly may for all I know. U.S. Customs says these scans are voluntary. Does that mean they get to strip search you if you refuse?

I’ve been looking for a more “natural” way to store URLs from the printed page (one that didn’t involve dragging the paper over to some device hooked up to the computer). Felix Strates sent me a link to the Cross NetPen which stores PaperClick bar codes. You dock the pen later and surf away. Now if someone adds the “press the button when you hear something on the radio you want to remember” technology to the same pen, you’ll have a super multimedia URL tool! I wonder how we can get URLs memorized off of billboards? Special radio signals going into your car?

IMAX, the huge movie projector people, are banking on being at the front of the digital projector market. A Forbes article states that IMAX has a close relationship with Texas Instruments, who has created the industry standard digital movie chip. But IMAX needs some funding to get the digital projector project ramped up. They’ve been public for a while. Keeping up with the latest technology will serve them well.

An awesome site of awesome sights: NASA’s Visible Earth, a searchable directory of images of the Earth. This page compares population in San Jose in 1973 vs 1999. 459,000 people to 839,000. I didn’t really need to see that.

Motorola has received permission from the bankruptcy court to destroy the Iridium satellites. A lot of pie in the sky will be going bye bye.

A consortium wants to use TV signals to serve up big “datacasts”. WaveExpress is already testing data broadcasts in select locations. Of course this only works one way, so a phone hookup for “up” is needed. TV folks hope this technology, wrapped around TV content, can give them back the eyeballs they’ve been losing to the Internet. A TV signal takes up 5 megabits of digital television’s 19.4 megabits downstream, so that extra bandwidth is being licensed from various stations as they upgrade to DTV.

I spent a few seconds at Macy’s housewares department turning dishes around. These dishes had three Chinese characters on them and although I can only recognize about ten characters in Chinese, I do know when something is upside down. But not everyone seems to be able to figure that out. That got me thinking about what characteristics of the language my brain has managed to gather together in order to know when something is upside down when I can’t even read it. It’s not just the brushstrokes; I can spot printed text as well. Can other languages’ “right side up” traits be categorized?

Byte has an article on the latest round of pen computers/tablets, which states that this new generation “could change the face of computing forever.” Having lived (some may say suffered) through the first try at making pen computing appealing to the masses — or even just the professional masses, I’m not sure what could bring that interaction method to the UI forefront. It’s perfect for specific applications, those “vertical markets” that keep PenRight! (what I worked on at GRiD) alive, and public web kiosks are served well with the tablet or touchscreen model. But the only place actual pen input with handwriting recognition, has caught on big is with the Palm OS. That has become mainstream enough to call the interaction method a success, but it’s still an alternative interaction. The keyboard really doesn’t marry well with pen input. It’s so much easier to get to a mouse than pick up a pen when keyboarding. So unless there is extreme need for a pen, for drawing most likely, or lack of need for the keyboard (e.g. if you never have to type a URL), I don’t think the interaction model will catch on big. (via RobotWisdom)

I love the Nissan Pathfinder commercial where the drivers are playing polo on lovely emerald green cliffs. The choreography of the cars and revving engines to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” is perfect. Adcritic has it in Quicktime.

Commentary from USA Today criticizes most of the networks for blathering too much during the Democratic convention and not giving us much actual convention coverage. I always channel surf during major news events to see the different perspectives. But during both conventions I eventually found myself wishing that C-SPAN didn’t change into Bravo in the evening on my cable service. The reasoning for most everything staged by both parties was too obvious to warrant much commentary, and I just wanted to watch what was going on, not what every political analyst, historian, and presidential biographer thought was going on. I did notice major differences in the audio. MSNBC had the loudest crowd noise. PBS had subdued crowd noise and the best podium audio. CNN had a decent balance between the two. (article via MediaNews)