halfdecent.net

I recently discovered news.ycombinator.com and I’m loving it. It’s another social link aggregator like digg or reddit, but I find the quality of the links excellent. I have space in my schedule for about two good, longish articles a day, and this site is producing more than I can handle. An embarrassment of riches. Examples from a day earlier this week include:

• Big dog video – impressive, very expensive looking robotic quadruped from DARPA
• Blowing up – a 2002 article from New York Times focussing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb – a hedge fund investor looking for black swans.
• Shell shock – a write up of a researcher at MIT interested in biologically inspired self-assembling materials.

Imagine a pill that signals when it’s been swallowed, allowing a patient to track their adherence to the drug’s regime and, if combined with other sensors, the impact of the treatment (thus allowing them to customise the regime in an informed manner). Well someone’s built one. Very sci fi.