Eat Kangaroos: Because Cows Fart Too Much

Programming Note: Due to other commitments, I'm planning to make this blog a weekly one since that gives me more motivation then "whenever I can find time," which I can't.

Strange story out of Australia this week. A study by a private consulting group, Australian Wildlife Services, suggests that the country could cut agricultural emissions by replacing herds of sheep and cattle with kangaroos. The reason: kargaroos emit less methane by far than either sheep or cows, and since methane is a potent greenhouse gas (yes, I said potent, insert fart joke here) the country's overall contribution to global warming could be reduced by about 10%.

While on the subject of the vaugely absurd, a newly formed company called OnLatte has reportedly developed a printer that will print various designs into the foam on your next latte. The machine started life as the print head from a plotter (a poster-format printer geekboy engineers use to print technical drawings) and a tank of edible brown ink. Another story were you can write your own punchline.

One thing I've never understood about life south of the border is this: what is he source of the belief that you can sue your way out of everything? A suit filed last week in Alabama accuses Apple of deliberately misleading consumers over iPhone 3G speeds. And this will fix what is clearly a technical glitch how, exactly? You might try the latest 3G-enabled media tablet from French gadget maker Archos and settle that pesky “is it the phone or the carrier” arguement once and for all.

Fans of Stargate SG-1 can rejoice (!) that they can now have an X301 all of thier own. Well, sort of. In this case it is a laptop following on from Lenovo's X300 ultraslim, not a modified Gou'ald glider.

I often wonder why so many engineers end up being tied down with administrative task or (gasp!) get promoted to management. It might be because, if left to run wild, every engineer out there would be dreaming up things like the Lotus Ice Concept Vehicle, a three-ski sled that uses a pusher propeller to zoom across the polar ice.

In scary tech news, a company called TrueMedia wants to set up face-capturing cameras near big screens at your local store and then use the screen to show you targeted advertising. Hello, has anybody seen Minority Report? Did it perhaps occur to you that maybe that isn't the future we want?

Another peice of technology scared me in another way this week, in the form of a PlayStation 3 controller equiped with a full qwerty keyboard above the normal PS3 buttons. The idea is to use it for online chat via the PS3's existing web services. But can you imagine the key combinations this could introduce to game play? Quick! Hit up-square-circle-alt-control-j!

And finally, we can all live in fear of the Mamavirus. Yes, that is the proper scientific name for this (relatively) huge virus found infecting amoebas in the Paris water supply (eeeew) last year. While not dangerous to humans, it has been found to itself harbour a smaller virus (dubbed Sputnik) which is the first know incidence of a virus that infects another virus, causing the mamavirus to deform and damaging its ability to replicate.