Ageless Immortality.

A better singing voice.

I’ve been having a pretty good week so far, so I’m just going to leave this here and see what happens.

Link. (I’ve already ordered one).

Rapidly evolving technology and increasing concern about the environmental impact of meat production are signs that vat-grown meat is moving from scientific curiosity to consumer option. In vitro meat production is a specialized form of tissue engineering, a biomedical practice in which scientists try to grow animal tissues like bone, skin, kidneys and hearts. Proponents say it will ultimately be a more efficient way to make animal meat, which would reduce the carbon footprint of meat products.

“To produce the meat we eat now, 75 to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue,” Jason Matheny, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and co-founder of New Harvest, a nonprofit that promotes research on in vitro meat, told Wired.com. “With cultured meat, there’s no body to support; you’re only building the meat that eventually gets eaten.”

I can’t wait. Maybe my recent commitment to refrain from eating mammals won’t spell the end of my red-meat-eating days after all.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Then, in the course of a gmail conversation, I returned to the page for the URL, so I could share the awesome design with someone else and lament how it seems that every time I order Threadless T-shirts more cool ones are released the following week. I then noticed that there were now only 17 medium-sized tees left, which gave me pause and made me sad, since it meant I’d now never get this shirt. For some reason I left that tab in my browser open, and when I returned to it 5 minutes later and refreshed it, out of curiosity, I saw that there were now only 7 tees left in medium.

Long story short, I ran upstairs, grabbed my wallet, cashed in my $9 worth of Threadless points, and that T-shirt is now on its way to me. Along an An Post charge of about €60, probably.

The knife one is only slightly amusing, but I love the chess piece T-shirt. Please direct all orders through this link so that I earn points.

I dreamt I had a pet panda last night. A sense of deep, profound disappointment has been hovering over me all day…

What say you dear readers?

Imagine that you have too many things to do and too little time to do them. Not very hard to imagine, right? For instance right now I have two essays to write for Friday, another one to do for Monday, an exam next Thursday, another essay the following week, etc… and in between all this I’m trying to study for a serious challenging GAMSAT exam, lead something approximating a normal social life, stay fit by going to the gym, and so on. It’s not impossible to do all these things simultaneously, and other people have things far worse (this isn’t a plea for pity), but sometimes it just feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done.

Enter Time Gun. Time Gun is a revolutionary device that stops time, rendering everything on Earth perfectly immobile except you and whatever you come into contact with. Thus, with Time Gun I could stop time right now, write my four essays, study for the Kant exam, study for the GAMSATs, etc… and then unfreeze time, perfectly primed for the coming days.

If nothing else, Time Gun certainly represents a more appealing alternative to what I presently do when confronted with a daunting workload, which is to drink way too much caffeine, head to the top floor of the library, and then blog nonsense because I can’t concentrate.

Threadless Site.

The mantra I repeat to myself every time I’m heading out the door at home is ‘phone/wallet/pod/keys’. This serves as quick checklist for everything that I’ll usually need in the course of a day. The next gadget I want to buy is one that will do away with the need for such a list, i.e., a gadget that serves as a phone, a method of payment, an MP3 player, and my car keys. Such a device is surely not too many years away, and it would be monumentally helpful in freeing up pocket space.

Technically, this should be achievable. There’s already a phone/music player hybrid, so the other two features could just be built into this. A method of payment feature would work much like a laser of VISA card, except it would be scanned a little differently, or maybe it could transfer the relevant information itself to some receiver at the cash register (a noun which will surely sound anachronistic within a decade or so). As regards integrating a car key, I believe that this should be even easier to accomplish. I’m pretty sure that my dad’s car doesn’t have a key as such, but instead the device that typically serves as an remote control locking system doubles as the means of ignition. Obviously there’d be some issues with regard to different models of cars needing different programming, and of course the settings for each car would have to be a little different, but this could all be ironed out eventually.

So there you have it. When I’m replacing my Polo (which probably won’t happen for some time), I want to be able to operate my next car with a device with which I can also make phone calls, with which I can also listen to music, and with which I can also pay for things. Get cracking Apple…

(If the good people at Science Week want to consider this as an entry for both today’s and yesterday’s competition then they’re more than welcome to do so.)

Site.

I am so getting this, even if it is only available in grey.