After reading Wikipedia’s definition of hippie, I wonder if I’ve selected the appropriate sentiment, given my life and lifestyle.  I’ll assume the “inner” modifier makes it all okay. 

I resist collecting things.  Yes, I still do, but I’ve just realized that I collect numbers.  I LOVE numbers.  My daughter just got her well-baby checkup numbers, and I had to go back over the record to make sure I had ALL the numbers.  Why?  She’s obviously perfectly normal.  I don’t need numbers to tell me that.  It’s because I’m a numbers collector.  Yup.  Judging by the numbers of baby books with reams of pages for numbers, I’ll guess that I’m not the only one. 

How on earth is collecting numbers an inner hippie?  Dang.  I reveal myself again and again to have no hippie in me whatsoever.  Well, I’ll try looking again tomorrow.

• Coming up from a cave-like interior into gorgeous sunlight with a hint of autumn in its dry warmth.

• “Your daughter has a face you could get addicted to.” Comment from a new friend with a toddler.

Multi-Touch Interaction Research

I came across this during a random stumble and am very excited. Jeff Han, a research scientist at NYU has been working with new forms of human-machine interaction models, and the multitouch Interaction platform is the result…it’s an amazing interface..no menus or mousing..it’s all done by touch. Use two fingers, all five or ten if you like. You can zooming, rotate, select, move… you name it, every way you can imagine manipulating data objects is probably possible with this thing. Plus it just looks like a ton of fun and is going to be the forerunner of virtual reality data representation  a la Minority Report or Neuromancer.
Check out the video here , it’s the only thing that can impart the true niftyness at hand here.

NASA - Borg Computer Collective Designs NASA Space Antenna

“This is the first time an artificially evolved object will have flown in space,” observed Jason Lohn, who led the project to design the antennas at NASA Ames Research Center, located in California’s Silicon Valley.

If all goes well, three of these computer-designed space antennas will begin their trip into space in March 2006. Each satellite will be equipped with a strange-looking, computer-designed space antenna. Although they resemble bent paperclips, the antennas are highly efficient.

This is pretty freaking cool, I gotta say. In a nutshell they’re working on a smallish device that will be able to identify the chemical composition of objects using Raman spectroscopy. They say it works today on earthbound objects.
‘Tricorder’ Ready For Mars Rover This Year: Science Fiction in the News