Thursday, July 07, 2005
- Begging to Differ points us to this exemplary Instapundit post, containing a collection of live blog accounts from the London terror attacks: it's an example of how news dissemination will never be the same again.
Today is not an easy day to be a public transit commuter, anywhere. We've some friends living in southwest London - who are thankfully safe, although they are transit riders. Chicago, like most major cities, has reported increased security in its public transit system starting today; but I didn't notice any increased presence yet this morning. I'll report on what I see tonight on the ride home. [MORE: CTA Security tips for bus and rail, CTA Tattler, ChicagoIST, and Gapers Block on the news]- Browse hundreds of newpaper front pages from around the U.S. and the world at a glance at the Newseum
- This news story makes me think of a Philip K. Dick novel:
"Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced." [Optics.org, via SlashDot]
Optics.org quotes the inventor,"I don't like carrying around a large number of cards, money and papers," Hayasaki from Tokushima University told Optics.org. "I think that a key application will be personal authentication. Data stored in a fingernail can be used with biometrics, such as fingerprint authentication and intravenous authentication of the finger."
So much valuable information, all on a finger! I can think of a few ugly fraud scenarios, mainly involving bolt and cigar cutters.
...
Although the initial experiments have concentrated on small pieces of nail, the team is now developing a system that can write data to a fingernail which is still attached to a finger. "We will develop a femtosecond laser processing system that can record the data at the desired points with compensation for the movement of a finger," said Hayasaki. - BoingBoing has a post today on Chicago's police spycams, which now not only watch, but listen. I saw one up close and personal for the first time last weekend, mounted on a pole near the Morse Red Line "L" stop: it looked like a little box-shaped cop-on-a-stick.
- Burned a CD/DVD-ROM, but no protective case to transport it? Try my quick-and-dirty "fishwrap" method. All you need is an ordinary letter-size sheet of paper:
- Lay the disc face-down on the center of the sheet.
- Fold the lower right corner upward diagonally over the disc (aiming across the center of the disc), the press the fold down.
- Turn the packet clockwise 90 degrees, and repeat the fold using the next corner.
- Repeat with the remaining two corners, and you now have a neatly-wrapped square packet that will protect your disc from scratches and fingerprints until you locate a proper storage binder or jewelcase.
farkleberries Links du Jour 104
