Synaptic Sugar

I’m experimenting with the jLanguage plugin by Jakob Jensen, which allows posting in more than one language and displays images of little flags, or text, through which users can choose what language to display posts in. Some, or all, posts from now on may have this feature, which means I’ll be writing both in English and in Italian, although the default language will stay English.

Comments are welcome in either language. I’d like to know what you think of this feature.

Like all geeks I love gadgets, and I was thinking it could be cool to get one of those robotic vacuum cleaners you often see advertised in stores or on the Web. However, based on many reviews I’ve read, I believe the time to get rid of the old manual upright vacuum cleaner has not yet come. Let’s take a look at two of the main crawling cleaner lines today.

The iRobot Roomba, pictured above, possibly the most well-known item in this category. Unfortunately it seems to have harder to clean parts and a certain “dumbness”: it works around a room, changing direction when it bumps into a wall or other obstacle, but without really “knowing” where it’s going (it uses simple movement algorithms like spiraling, wall following and random walk). The result is the cleaned surface is not going to be homogeneous at all times. Newer generations also try to detect a recharge station via an infrared sensor and go to it to recharge themselves, if they find it. These come at around $160 to $200.

The Electrolux Trilobite, which seems to be smarter than the Roomba in that it employs ultrasonic and infrared sensors, and maps rooms to know where it has cleaned and where it has not. It can also return to its recharging station more effectively than the Roomba (having mapped its location), and has removable and more easily cleanable parts. However, sharp corners may give the built-in radar some headaches, and the added artificial intelligence comes at a price of around $1800, ten times the Roomba price.

Both kinds apparently have batteries that don’t last overly long before they need to be recharged, but their biggest problems are they don’t fit into corners (both being round), they take quite longer than a human would to vacuum clean a floor (making battery duration an issue) and they don’t always cover all the surface they should. They’re also as noisy as a regular vacuum cleaner, so you wouldn’t use them while sleeping at night, but rather when you’re out doing something else.

In short, I think I’ll stick to old-fashioned, “analog” upright vacuum cleaners and brooms, until something more reliable, efficient and maybe cheaper comes out. Or I might invest in an expensive upright Dyson one day. Any thoughts?

Ever wanted to work for Initech? Me neither, but now you can customize your cubicle to make it look like you do, with the Office Space kit from Thinkgeek. I’ll put it on my wish list.

Yeah. Now where’s my stapler?

Note: if you haven’t seen Office Space, do so now, then write a TPS report among the comments.

I know a recent post was about the latest space discoveries, but here’s another one nonetheless. This time NASA released images and videos of a strange hexagon-shaped feature encircling the north pole of Saturn, a feature that was already imaged by Voyager 1 and 2, now 26 years ago, and is apparently so stable that it’s still there.

The Cassini spacecraft’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer now gives us clearer images of the whole hexagonal structure, which is big enough to contain four Earths, although getting a visual image won’t be possible until the 15 years of polar night end at the end of the Saturn winter (in around two more years).

It’s still not known what exactly gives the hexagon its regular shape, but the new data helped scientist determine it shouldn’t be related to radio emissions or auroral activity.

This is not latest news, but is still worth mentioning. A crew of fishermen from New Zealand were looking for Patagonian toothfish, at the end of last February, in Antarctic waters. They must have been quite surprised when they found out that one of the toothfish they had caught was being eaten by what is known as a colossal squid. The squid, now kept at the national museum in New Zealand, is around 1000 pounds (453 kg) heavy and 39 feet (almost 12 meters) long; estimates vary with the source — I assume it mustn’t be easy to accurately weigh and measure a huge mass of gooey mollusc — but are invariably impressive.

This is the biggest specimen ever found. The beast is currently being kept frozen in a one cubic meter block of ice and will have to be thawed before it can be further studied; that in itself is going to be a major feat, as the thawing process must occur slowly and evenly, to make sure no damage occurs to the creature’s meats. Some rumors say it might even be microwaved, at some point.

Once carefully thawed, it will finally be chopped down to produce the largest appetizer sampler ever created.