Oddball Tech: Invisible lamps, kids’ computers, and the Internet is alive

Invisible lamp (pictured to the right)

If you’ve got one carbon nanotube filament, you’ve got the world’s tiniest lamp. Get this, when the lamp is off, you can’t see the filament. Heat it up using electricity and you’ve got a glow. Now you can avoid the ever annoying search for lamps. Invisible lamps match any decor, but you’d probably need a lot of them to actually be useful since they don’t give off that much light. [Source]

Kids’ computer?

Here comes an “old man rant.” When I was a kind our coolest toys were things like Voltron or Transformers. Now, kids get their own computers. PeeWee PC just unleashed a $600 tablet PC with a handle and a stylus. After reading its stats, this computer actually seems like an expensive ruggedized netbook that you may not want to give to a kid. Tell that kid to use his damn imagination while you use the PeeWee Pivot Tablet PC. This kind of low cost rugged machine probably would be better off in the field for research. [Source]

Internet gets a life: Terminator cross promotion or time to freak out?

So if you take a bunch of electrical signals and connect them into a network, you’re looking for trouble. That’s the way the brain works and that’s the way the Internet works. Uh oh.

Wait a second. Is this a thinly veiled Terminator Salvation promotion? The movie comes out in late May.

The chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute says that the Internet may “already have a degree of consciousness.” Does this mean it’s time to panic? Nah. It means it’s time to watch the Terminator movies to make sure we know how to fight the machines. [Source]