m. c. de marco

Via Daring Fireball: the FriendDA is an informal NDA for sharing Ideas with Advisors. That is, when you’ve dreamt up the next Big Thing and need a helpful friend to tell you whether it’s MacOS X (brilliant!) or Windows Vista (don’t quit your day job…), a FriendDA gives you moral protection from theft of your possibly brilliant idea.

But it’s only moral protection. For legal protection, you’d need a real NDA.

Via plime: Wired reports on the In Vitro Meat Symposium and the growing prospects of vat meat.

I found this prediction accidentally, through a disease search for my other blog that picked up on an odd statement about Parkinson’s. (I have no idea what the “pea-sized computer” refers to, unless it’s some sort of misunderstanding of Deep Brain Stimulation.) In any event, your friendly futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that the successor to this mythical pea will be in-brain VR:

Via plime: the Toronto Star reports on the E-puzzler, the world’s only mass-unshredding machine, and its progress in piecing together 16,250 bags full of shredded or torn up STASI documents.

Prior to the creation of the E-puzzler, a team of 15 Germans had laboriously been putting the pieces together by hand. But they managed to rebuild only 10,000 documents from 300 bags during 12 years. The German government estimated it would take a further 600 to 800 years to finish the job.

Slashdotters speculate on the perennial challenge of hitting the Red Planet without going splat:

[Q] Some[one] care to elaborate on the difference between hitting the ground at mach 4 and hitting the ground at mach 1?

Via Brass Goggles, the amazing Carbolic Smoke Ball! a Victorian snake-oil cure:

£100 reward will be paid by the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company to any person who contracts the increasing epidemic influenza, colds or any disease caused by taking cold, after having used the ball three times daily for two weeks according to the printed directions supplied each ball.

Via GeekPress: Nature reports on carbon nanotubes in Damascus steel.

Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.

Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords’ manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.