Someone should start a site called ComaCatchUp.com. You could enter how long you’ve been in a coma (e.g., “6 years”) and it would give you all you needed to know to catch up on the world.

You’d start by capturing the major news of each week, then creating monthly stories, then editing them to be relevant in the future. For example, the news that Kerry is leading in the polls might be news this week, but a few years from now no one will care who was leading when. So you’d have to edit for the future, so to speak.

You’d also want to include things like acronyms, slang, prices, and so on.

I don’t know if it would be best to create a running narrative that covers everything, or divide it up into sections — politics, entertainment, etc. But still — Coma Catchup. Think about it.

Russ Kick, who runs The Memory Hole, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain several photos of flag-draped coffins returning home from Iraq.

The U.S. military had banned these photos, but a hiccup of some sort led to their release to Kick. He published them. When word got out, the military reiterated its ban, but it was too late.

According to an ABC News story about a Seattle woman who, along with her husband, lost her job loading cargo planes because she snapped a photo, the military’s policy was “crafted with input from families to protect the privacy and dignity of the deceased.” The article goes on to say, “Critics have said the rules are aimed at sanitising the war for the public.”

There is no violation of privacy in these particular photos (the link is below). They are anonymous coffins, without any way to identify what branch of service the soldiers within are from. Nor are they grisly. They are coffins. Lots of coffins.

Still, if you are easily upset or offended, don’t click below.

Click here to see the images.

Whilst perusing the job listings for people wanting editors, I found a bunch of new listings on CareerBuilder for “News and Media” in several cities — Houston, Norfolk, San Diego. The company was the U.S. Navy. Curious, I clicked.

The ads are all the same, and all fairly generic. They’re Navy recruiting ads! They spell out the possibilities for news and media training in the Navy (e.g., “As a videographer with a combat photography unit, you might develop a training video for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team. As a Photojournalist, your images of a humanitarian-relief operation in a foreign country could open the eyes of the world.”).

It’s certainly an interesting tack, trying to recruit new sailors by placing ads on career sites. I guess they’re running out of volunteers. Good thing I’m past draft age.

So Ford is upset that its concept ad for one of its European cars, the Sportka, is circulating on the Net. Why? Because it shows a cat being decapitated.

Click here to view the ad. (1MB .MPG file)

Pentax’s new slogan, if you can believe it, is (and I kid you not), “The Official Digital Camera of the Internet.”

Says who? (Al Gore?) No one owns the Internet, you doofuses! No one can declare you the official anything of the Net! What a load of… well, you know.

Bruce Schneier, whose site describes him as “an internationally renowned security technologist and author” did some off-the-cuff analysis of whether it would be worth it for either major political party to hack an election. The results are scary, even if I don’t agree entirely with his logic.

He points out that, by changing less than one-quarter of a percent of votes in 2002, the Democrats could have taken control of the House. That’s about 164,000 votes spread over 50 states. In other terms, by switching fewer than one in every 250 votes, we’d have a radically different Congress.

Considering, as Schneier says, that the 2002 Congressional candidates raised more than half a billion combined dollars, there’s obviously enough money around to throw at the right programmers.

Read his piece. Then you’ll see why so many people are demanding a voter-verified paper trail.

I have a MiniDV camcorder, which I hook up to my computer to do video editing. (I wish it was as good as that sounds. What I really do is edit all the good ‘takes’ together and add a title so no one has to sit through hours and hours of Sam.

The camcorder connects to the PC via a FireWire cable. (That’s a really fast connection, for those of you who haven’t heard of it.) Then the computer can access the tape in the camcorder to copy the video onto my hard drive, and later to put the edited video back onto a tape. Each tape holds an hour of DVD-quality video

Each tape holds something like 12GB of data (1 hour of digital video at about 216MB per minute — someone correct me if I’m wrong). So I wonder if there’s a way to use MiniDV tapes for system backup. Either someone could make a drive that takes the tapes the way the old Colorado tape backups used to work, or someone could create software that lets you use your camcorder as a backup drive.

Either way, I think the cheap price and ubiquity of those tapes make this a decent idea.

Joel Johnson from Gizmodo had a great link to a CNN article on nanotechnology.

Nanotech is yet another one of those topics that popular culture doesn’t quite understand, so it ends up writing bad books and making bad movies about the stuff. Kind of like all the radiation-created monsters from 1950s movies (e.g., 1954’s Them).

Anyway, it’s not just the CNN article that’s good. It’s Johnson’s blurb about it. He writes:

CNN has a decent overview on nanotechnology, so if you’ve missed the last ten years of science fiction or bad movies (or worse, not missed them), it offers a pretty good place to start. Nanotechnology, as a term, is slowly changing from ‘tiny robots’ to encompass atomic-scale manipulation in general–although it’s hard to stop thinking about the robots, I know. The article also has a picture of this scanning tunneling microscope, which is easy to get excited about, because it is shiny.

Yep, that “shiny” comment is pretty accurate. It’s easy, especially in 30-second news bytes, to skip the less picturesque but more interesting stuff and head right for the big shiny machine. Nanotech robots in our blood stream are cool (or at least newsworthy). Nano-composite materials that make better airplane skins… well, not as much.

Wow, Yahoo News picked up my column this week — neat! If you’ve come here from Yahoo (and you liked my column on LEDs), check out my previous columns on USAToday.com — like last week’s on lie detectors.

If you go to www.usatoday.com, then click on Tech, you’ll see my name in the list of columnists on the left side. That links to my latest column, and you can get to older stuff from there.

Enjoy!

OK! OK! Enough people have written in about the light-bulb puzzle at the beginning of my column on LEDs that I have to put this in. [chuckle and roll of eyes]

Here’s the puzzle for those who missed it:

You’re standing outside of a room with a tightly closed door. There are three light switches in front of you and three lamps in the room. You want to know which switch turns on which light in the room, but you’re only allowed to open the door once. How do you do it?

The answer I gave is: “Turn on the first switch for a few minutes. Turn it off. Turn on the second light. Open the door and go into the room. The first switch controls the bulb that’s warm, the second switch controls the bulb that’s lit, and the third switch controls the bulb that’s off.”

What everyone is pointing out is that the “rules” say you can only open the door once, so why not stand in the doorway and flick switches? Good point! The puzzle was meant to be rhetorical, so I didn’t put enough time into it.

See, another version has you up in the attic with the three switches, but the bulbs are in the basement. It was a longer explanation so I used the ‘doorway’ version. Silly me!

Thanks to everyone who wrote in!

* * *
Follow-Ups
On a different note, thanks to Doc LeDuc who pointed me to a site by a company that makes high-power LED-based lights for theatre-type work. Cool stuff. Check out Pixelpar!

And Tommy Huynh, who has worked in developing white LED lighting systems, writes in:

They make sense in mobile applications but to replace incandescent lights in most applications, [compact fluorescent lamps] make more sense. White LEDs still lose intensity over time (just like fluorescents, they rely on phosphor also) and have lower efficiency, not to mention costs. Sure this will change as economies of scale weigh in but those bulbs aren’t going to the museum anytime soon.

In my column on batteries, I mentioned that lithium-ion batteries can explode. Turns out I was right.

Here’s a job your six year old might be interested in

When I was a kid in New York, I learned a couple of telephone tricks. One was that if you dialed 660, waited for a dialtone, dialed 6, waited again, and hung up twice, the phone would ring back a few seconds later. My friend Tommy and I used to do it to payphones — 660-dialtone-6-dialtone-6-hang up twice. Then we’d scoot away at let the phone ring.

Another trick was to dial 958. That would simply read back the phone number you were calling from to you. For a 12 year old, this was neat stuff.

Alas, the phone system has changed. Today, though, I was thinking about these. Dialing 660 (here in Columbus) did nothing, but dialing 958 got me a recording that ‘the number you dialed can’t be reached.’ So 958 is still something other than a normal exchange.

(I wonder why TV shows don’t use 958 as a fake exchange instead of using 555 all the time.)

Anyway, just for fun I looked online to see what the deal was (now) with 660 and 958. I found a great page at hackfaq.org that has all that stuff. It turns out that 114, 951, 954, and 957 are also special codes/exchanges.

What can you do with this? Not much. But I still think it’s cool that there are codes you can dial with your phone that do things other than you might expect.

Now at some CompUSA stores, instead of buying software from a box on the shelf you can go to a single kiosk to buy any of hundreds of titles. The software is stored on the kiosk’s hard drive and a CD is burned when a customer makes a choice. No more wasting shelf space (and cardboard) with boxes that just get thrown away.

This will probably only work for software titles people know of in advance; it’s still nice to browse through physical items (i.e., read the boxes) in a store if you don’t know what you want. But if you come looking for, say, Easy CD Creator and you know that’s what you want, who needs the box?

A long time ago I suggested that music ought to be sold this way, and I still do. Why don’t music stores sell you a CD with 10 songs of your choice for the same price as 10 songs the record label chose? Hmm.