Tree House Security

Why isn't this product sold at every Wal-Mart! It needs some look and feel changes, but modern plastic molding will fix that.



What is it?

It's a secret knock door lock. That's right. It's a specialized motor you place over your dead bolt. It listens to the knock on the door, and unlocks the dead bolt if it's the correct knock!



Brilliant!

Do you think they could make one that opens the garage when I bang on it?

Christopher Walken: Still Awesome

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Put your hands together for Mr. Walken performing Lady Gaga's opus, Poker Face!

Variable Speed Bumps

This is a pretty brilliant idea, and I hope it catches on. Decano Industries makes speed bumps that only appear if you are driving over the speed limit.

The system measures the level of impact your car makes when it touches the front of the bump. If the impact is low enough, the rubber covered triangles collapse under the weight of the car. If the bump is too vigorous, the triangle locks together jolting the driver.



This would be great, because even the over sized speed bumps require you to slow down under 20. Lawrence puts those things in 30 mile per hour zones, which I find highly annoying. I'm obeying the law, why do I need to be bothered.

You could even put a large number of bumps clumped together to make it very uncomfortable for speeders.

Ad Man from TED Evil

This is a very humorous talk given by Rory Sutherland about perceived value of intangibles, and why it's important that we increase its value.



Definitely worth a watch, but if you can't spare the time, I'll give you a few of the highlights.

The basic premise is that if you would like to live in a future with fewer material goods, you want to live in a world that values intangibles. For example, engineers were asked how to make a 3 hour train ride more bearable. Their solution was to build a 6 billion pound track that shortens the trip by 40 minutes.

Super.

The ad man's answer, from an intangible standpoint, you should employ all the world's top super models to hand out the best wine for free during the trip.

It would cost half as much.


Another story, this one from the 19th century, Ataturk wanted to discourage the wearing of a veil in Turkey. He saw it as an old tradition that was holding back the Turkish culture.

Boring people would have just outlawed the veil. Ataturk make the veil compulsory for prostitutes to wear.


Italy discovered another interesting piece of intangible value. In Britain, you get points for each traffic violation. You lose your license after receiving 12.

Italy, instead, gave the driver 12 points and deducting the points for each traffic violation. They discovered that loss aversion is a much more powerful influence on people's behavior.


The best advertising campaign he discussed was one for a cereal called Shreddies. It's basically Brittan's version of Wheat Chex. This was their advert.




Finally, he finished with a quote from G.K. Chesterton.

"We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders"

Hilariously, right after the TED video is an advertisement for Rolex.

Lots of Slow Bullets

This is 10 minutes of bullets being filmed with high speed cameras.

You're welcome.

Use the Stairs

This is a neat idea for behavior modification. They transform this subway stairwell into a piano as a means of entertainment.



They saw a 66% increase in the number of people taking the stairs over the escalator. The question I have is if those numbers would stay up. Would the novelty wear off, or would people continue to choose the piano?

What if every stairwell in the subway was transformed... Too annoying?

Computer Artists

There have been a couple of developments in computer image creation that I thought were worth motioning. The first is called seam carving. The way it works is the computer or user identifies areas of the photograph that are unnecessary.

For instance, given a picture of two kids in a field, you could easily add or remove sections of the grass between the two kids affectively stretching or shrinking the image.

The 1 minute mark of the video has a great example.




The second interesting image processing tool uses a repository of images such as your 10 gigabyte photo library or Google image search. The user provides stick figure drawing of what image they desire, and the system discovers photos and matches them to the sizes provided by the sketch.

The results are instant scenes that never happened.