Here’s a small-but-powerful market for you: medical professionals. The other day my doctor walked in with this big, floppy laptop that he had a real tough time using (there was no flat surface that could accommodate it properly). I learned from my experiences at a clinical trial company that doctors in hospitals use tablet computers all the time for virtual charts and for data entry when participating in clinical trials and studies. I think in this sector the tablet (I really don’t want to even type its name) could be huge.

His on-point rebuttal:

Somebody is going to have to want this pretty badly. The big hospital chains are using customized software with big price tags, maintenance agreements and a lengthy development cycle. (For similar reasons, I’d bet many of the laptops and tablets in use by these doctors today are running XP, rather than Vista or 7.)

A hospital wouldn’t really be able to switch over until the medical imaging software provider, the patient data management software provider, the billing and accounting software provider and whoever else all have designed iPad interfaces that work with these programs. That doesn’t strike me as a small thing, or anything that’s likely to happen with the big health service providers within the next 24 months. It’s probably also not something where third parties can fill the gaps — with a few exceptions, medical software companies use proprietary data formats and non-standard programming interfaces.

But this can all happen sooner for smaller practitioners, who basically just need an iPad front-end for off-the-shelf database software. This will be a boon to young and handsome medical professions seeking to appear younger and more handsome.

So much awkwardness. Small iPhone apps stuck right in the middle of the screen. The dock looks like it has the stability of a mid-game Jenga tower.

Phil Schiller says, “it’s going to change the way we do the things we do every day.” I’m sorry for yelling but, THAT’S WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT THE SEGWAY. We’re not going to have to “rethink cities” so to speak. It’s not going to change shit. It’s the worst of both worlds, which is just what I was afraid of. It’s the clunkiness of a laptop with the tough typing of an iPhone. It won’t even be the best way to watch video (laptops will still take that prize ’cause you won’t have to hold them up the whole time).

The price looks good, though (and the stock market seemed to agree). I also bet there could be some real interesting 3rd party apps that take advantage of touch that just wouldn’t make sense on the iPhone (the “Brushes” painting app for one).

The emerald cockroach wasp or jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) is a solitary wasp of the family Ampulicidae. It is known for its unusual reproductive behavior, which involves disabling a live cockroach and using it as a host for its larvae
…
A 2003 study[2] using radioactive labeling demonstrated that the wasp stings precisely into specific ganglia of the roach. It delivers an initial sting to a thoracic ganglion and injects venom to mildly and reversibly paralyze the front legs of the insect. This facilitates the second venomous sting at a carefully chosen spot in the roach’s head ganglia (brain), in the section that controls the escape reflex.

More of this craziness at Wikipedia

Proponents of evolution, I love you and Ima let you finish, but how the hell can such a specific sequence of precise events — results of which would be failures without proper precision and order — be the result of natural selection?

I’m not signed into twitter. I just gave my username and password to some website trying to look like twitter.

I quickly logged into the real twitter and changed my password. For those of you on twitter, watch out. I’m pretty vigilant about this kind of thing, but I was tricked!

I just watched the Spiderman movies and was curious about Peter Parker’s job at the Daily Bugle. Was J Jonah Jameson always such a Spiderman hater? If not, when did that develop?

How much would I pay? If it were $9.99 I might buy one old comic. If it were $5.99 I might buy two or three. If it were $1.99 or even $2.99 I’d probably end up buying quite a few (e.g. more than 10).

It would be great to preview these comics where you could see full resolution cover and the first 4 or so pages — which is basically what you may read if you were buying a comic book at a comic book store.

I’m unsubscribing because this is the majority of Wired’s content and I find none of this useful:

• Look at this pretty NASA photo
• Try to find our reporter! (My god, who really cared about this?)
• How-to wiki which has a promising title but no useful content
• Look at this photo of a crazy animal!
• This day in science. (After the invention of Wikipedia this is kind of redundant.)
• Reader photo contest!
• Seven-day-old tech news!

In the “How-to wiki”s defense, I subscrige to their RSS feed, so I see these articles when they first pop up and, as they are wikis, they are not going to be at their best at this stage. However, why don’t they just delay the publication of these wiki articles to their RSS until they have some useful content?

Occasionally Wired will come up with an interesting piece of investigative journalism but you know what? When that happens the other blogs I read notice it and put up a post about it.

About glass houses: I’m sure if you’re reading this you’re saying to yourself, “I think I’m going to unsubscribe to Brian’s blog.”

Though, this isn’t the first time. Remember those crazy bike trails in the woods near Chapel Hill High School? This picture is from there (incidentally, very close to where I proposed to Meredith!):

“How, how can we give this story of a robot in an eternal seek-mission for the motherly-love of one specific woman who died two millennia ago a happy ending?” yells Spielberg. “Eureka! Advanced robots will bring her back to her exact age and exact set of memories up to that age using DNA saved by an animated teddy bear. Oooh… but she still will eventually die right? Okay, well, she’ll die and we’ll come up with some bullshit about how space-time only allows us to bring people back once and for only one day and this one day she spends with our robot-child will be so perfect that he’ll go into some sort of bliss coma and we’ll live happily ever yadda yadda NEXT!”

I’m going to watch Transformers because I really have to see if it could possibly be worse than this.

Update: I struck me yesterday that these experiments in averageness are somewhat interesting in that they kind of approach the uncanny-valley from the other end. Normally we see people trying to make lifelike robots that end up totally freaking out our brains. In this case, these people are starting with human images and making them weirdly plastic looking.