Tickled?

Dr. Strabismus (whom God Preserve) of Utrecht is to launch Channel 4 minus 1 which will allow viewers to see Channel 4's programmes one hour before they're on Channel 4.


"The channel is an exact replica of Channel 4’s schedule that is simply one hour in advance," the good Doctor has explained. "It will allow viewers to check out shows sixty minutes early, which will give them plenty of time to make sure they don't miss any programmes that happen to tickle their fancy when they are broadcast an hour later."


In a related development Strabismus Laboratories has pre announced a 'battery powered Channel 4 branded fancy tickler' that will be launched in time for Christmas, along with a 'leather grape', 'a revolving wheelbarrow', and 'a hollow glass walking stick for keeping very small flannel shirts'.

Dr. Strabismus (Whom God Amuse) of Utrecht

Facial recognition software is revolutionising security systems but it’s also helping a small arts club in Spain turn a larger profit.

The industry has reportedly suffered huge setbacks after the government raised the tax on theatre tickets from 8 per cent to 21 per cent.

In an entertaining video outlining its efforts, the club says immediately after the move by the authorities, audience numbers reduced by 30 per cent in one year.

They had to think of an inventive and ingenious way of counteracting this decline.

In conjunction with advertising agency The Cyranos McCann, the venue began experimenting by installing tablets on the back of audience members’ seats and recording each time they laughed.

Entrance to the club is free, but each laugh amounts to €0.30 (£0.24) – to a maximum of 80 laughs for €24 (£18).

Dr. Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht is carrying out research work with a view to crossing salmon with mosquitoes. He says it will mean a bite every time for fishermen.

Dr Strabismus Rises Again

Whoppercoin is a cryptocurrency you can eat or trade. It’s part of a loyalty program launched by Burger King Russia.

Ford and Domino’s Pizza are teaming up to test self-driving pizza delivery cars in Michigan, as part of an effort to better understand how customers respond to and interact with autonomous vehicles.

It's Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht's world, we just live in it.

Dr Strabismus Rides Again

Dr. Strabismus (whom God Preserve) of Utrecht hasn't appeared on these spindrift pages since 2019.

Bugatti reveals the world's most expensive pool table: £217,000 'self-levelling' table will allow superyacht owners to play while at sea.

Back with a vengeance.

The table uses a gyroscopic sensor to level the playing surface and adjust for movements on sea. 

Bugatti said: 'Each leg can move to compensate for the movement of a ship and remain perfectly level. 

'The system can adjust in just five milliseconds, and the movement is completed in total silence with vibration-free adjustment.'

STRABISMUS shouldst be living at this hour

Sky has developed technology to transfer adverts from train windows directly and silently into commuters' heads.

Passengers leaning their head against the window will "hear" adverts "coming from inside the user's head", urging them to download the Sky Go app.

The proposal involves using bone conduction technology, which is used in hearing aids, headphones and Google's Glass headset, to pass sound to the inner ear via vibrations through the skull.

STRABISMUS shouldst be living at this hour:
Utrecht hath need of he (whom God preserve)

Strabismus Inc. Ink

Utrecht:

Finnish phone company Nokia has applied for a patent on tattoos that would sense when your mobile phone is ringing.

Using metal ores, the ‘tattoo’ would vibrate when a phone call was being received or when a user’s battery was running low.

The US patent application says that a user would have to scratch their arm to dismiss the alert, which would feel like a tingling sensation.As the tattoo is inserted under the skin, however, users would have to commit to a minor surgical procedure to take advantage of the new technology, which Nokia says would only be activated after scars have healed. The technology could also be applied superficially, but would be less resistant to wear and tear.
Communicating using different sequences of single or multiple pulses, the tattoo could theoretically do different things for messages, emails or warnings.

In the application, Nokia says that 'Prior to using the ferromagnetic inks for attaching to human skin, the ink material may be exposed to elevated temperatures to cause demagnetization. Such demagnetized ink is then used for creating an image by dispersing the ink material on or under the skin to make a functional, tattoo like image. Once the apparatus is settled and the skin cured, the user with the functional image may use permanent magnets to magnetize the functional image on the skin again.'

The application was filedthis month at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

http://nickbrowne.coraider.com/search?q=strabismus

Things that shouldn't exist: a continuing series

Smarttress with Lover Detection System is a revolutionary mattress composed of 24 intelligent sensors capable of capturing the “suspicious” bed movement. In this way if you are not at home, Smarttress will send an alert to your mobile when the mattress is being used. Order now at: www.smarttress.com

I am no expert but it seems to me that even thinking about installing a high-tech mattress to monitor what is going on in your bed when you aren't there might just conceivably be a symptom of Paranoid Personality Disorder. Imagine the possibility for misunderstandings (and indeed feelings of inadequacy engendered if thrust impact and frequency are part of the telemetry passed on to an app on your phone) when the kids decide to play trampoline on it.

Dr. Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht: First of all, there is something in the mind and spirit of an inventor which is understood only by that person, that drives him to create, to make something new that is serviceable to mankind. Perhaps, it is something of the artist merged with the mechanic along with a curiosity and desire to make things better and easier. And, there must also be the desire to be acknowledged as a creator.

Ariel Dorfman: Those who have never suffered the iniquities of exile cannot possibly understand the significance, the gravitas, of a mattress.

Dr. Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht: Spoken like a true Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist, my friend.

What the fork?!

Eating too fast, and not chewing long enough leads to poor digestion and poor weight control.

The HAPIfork is an electronic fork that monitors your eating habits. The HAPIfork gives you precise information about your eating schedule. The HAPIfork alerts you with the help of indicator lights when you are eating too fast.

Every time you bring food from your plate to your mouth with your fork, this action is called:
a "fork serving".

The HAPIfork also measures:

• How long it took to eat your meal.
• The amount of “fork servings" taken per minute.
• Intervals between "fork servings".

This information is then uploaded via USB or Bluetooth to your Online Dashboard to track your progress.

The HAPIfork also comes with the HAPILABS app plus a coaching program to help you eat better and change your eating behavior.

It is fun to laugh at the Strabismus-grade madness of this but, dear me, we do live in a stupid and credulous age.

If it doesn't tun your stomach, there is always Dean Kamen. From the man who brought you the Segway comes AspireAssist: a pump that will “drain” your stomach through a valve inserted into the abdominal wall.

Group Hug

Designers have come up with a jacket that actively gives you a cuddle when someone says they like you on the social network site.

The "Like-A-Hug" jacket inflates when someone clicks on the "Like" button putting a little more reality into virtual reality.

Designed by MIT student Melissa Chow, who said it "allows us to feel the warmth, encouragement, support, or love that we feel when we receive hugs".

Hugs can also be sent back to the original sender by squeezing the vest and deflating it.

What an excellent idea this is in the week of the Tory Party Conference: David's Cameroons can now hug-a-hoody without the inconvenience of actually meeting.

Dr. Strabismus (whom God preserve)of Utrecht is reportedly hard at work on version 2 inspired by the phrase "when you have a man by the balls his heart and mind will follow".

The Kitchen of Dr Strabismus

BELLEVUE, Wash. — Inside a nondescript warehouse on a nondescript street of this Seattle suburb is a research laboratory that looks like it came out of a James Bond movie — had Q the gadget master been a gastronome.

Here Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft, and his company, Intellectual Ventures, pursue an eclectic array of speculative and potentially world-changing ideas — inventing a new battery, taming hurricanes, defeating disease. And here, along with the laser designed to shoot mosquitoes out of the air (a high-speed camera counts the rate of wing-flapping to ensure that innocent insects are not vaporized), is the best-equipped restaurant kitchen anywhere that never serves any customers.

Dr. Myhrvold exuded a Willy Wonka enthusiasm as he talked of the foods that came out of his industrial food dehydrator. “Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing,” he said.

At another machine, rose petals spun inside a glass globe. “This is basically a still,” he said. “You could crank the temperature up and distill alcohol. What we’re trying to do here is get an essence of rose petals.”

The yield would be a few fragrant tablespoons of liquid.

Around the corner, he pointed to two machines side by side. “Here’s our ice cream machine, and here’s our ultrasonic welder,” he said.

Had he used the welder as a cooking appliance? “Not yet,” he said, earnestly,” but we’re going to try it out.”

After all, an autoclave designed to sterilize lab equipment has proven culinarily productive — “It’s basically the pressure cooker from hell,” Dr. Myhrvold said — as has a 100-ton hydraulic press, for beef jerky.

How we live now: part the umpteenth

The Bomber left his jacket behind in training last night, so he cooked our dinner as I drove back to the Hub to pick it up. How remarkable to think he could fry a couple of gammon steaks using a pan that didn't transmit feed back to his iPhone.

I should get him a present as a reward. How about this training gear?

Athos's new EMG shorts ($99, plus $199 for a plastic core that transmits to a free iPhone app). EMG stands for electromyography, a method of measuring the electrical signal that motor nerves send to muscle fibers to make them contract. The stronger the signal, the more muscle fibers are being recruited, and the harder the muscle is working. EMG is normally available only to elite athletes, but Athos has worked it into a pair of shorts for regular humans. Once the shorts are on and calibrated, a tiny, light-up version of your body appears on the app. As your muscles work harder, the inner and outer quads, hamstrings, and glutes on the screen change color, from blue to red.

The app can show you, in real time, how tiny imbalances in form and strength can wreak havoc across your entire muscular system—as well as how to fix them.

File under: Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht.

pot plants and crisp packets could be spying on you

Abstract
When sound hits an object, it causes small vibrations of the object’s surface. We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, allowing us to turn everyday objects—a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips—into visual microphones. We recover sounds from highspeed footage of a variety of objects with different properties, and use both real and simulated data to examine some of the factors that affect our ability to visually recover sound. We evaluate the quality of recovered sounds using intelligibility and SNR metrics and provide input and recovered audio samples for direct comparison. We also explore how to leverage the rolling shutter in regular consumer cameras to recover audio from standard frame-rate videos, and use the spatial resolution of our method to visualize how sound-related vibrations vary over an object’s surface, which we can use to recover the vibration modes of an object.

"Allowing us to turn everyday objects—a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips—into visual microphones." This is the age of Dr Strabismus.

Is he housebroken or is he going to leave batteries all over the floor?

In a world where Nicole Scherzinger is dressed by Dr Strabismus ....



Don't tell me that love hurts. I read the book, I saw the film, I got the T-shirt.

Non, je ne regrette rien

Prof. Yishay Mansour of Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Science launched his new project at the International Conference on Learning Theory in Haifa, Israel, earlier this year. His research will help computers minimize what Prof. Mansour calls "regret." Google recently announced that it will fund Tel Aviv University computer scientists and economists to develop this foundational research, a nexus on the cutting edge of computer science and game theory.

"If the servers and routing systems of the Internet could see and evaluate all the relevant variables in advance, they could more efficiently prioritize server resource requests, load documents and route visitors to an Internet site, for instance," Prof. Mansour says — an efficiency that Google finds very attractive.

Of course computers can't "feel" regret — but they can measure the distance between a desired outcome and the actual outcome. Prof. Mansour recently developed an algorithm based on machine learning, or "artificial intelligence," to minimize the amount of virtual regret a computer program might experience.

It's as if Charlie Suet and Dr Strabismus collaborated on an idea.

Tel Aviv, Schmel Aviv; imagine what Jesuit pedagogy could do to a could do here. We'd have network cards that were wracked with guilt over dropping a packet and virtual servers that felt like frauds.

Wearable tomato project

Training for a marathon? Shigenori Suzuki thinks you need more tomatoes in your system. That's why, in anticipation of yesterday's Tokyo Marathon, the 38-year-old Kagome Co. (a tomato and tomato-based product manufacturer and distributor) employee devised the Tomatan, a handsfree wearable device that sits on your shoulders and feeds you tomatoes at the flick of a switch. "Tomatoes is great for sports," Suzuki explains in a poorly-captioned video on his new technology. "If we would eat tomatoes every day, the lycopene levels in our bodies increases, increases antioxidant power, and helps us to maintain our physical condition healthy [sic]." With the ability to carry up to seven medium-sized tomatoes, this is one wearable you don't wanna be caught running without.

Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht has been dating a girl with a lazy eye, but they have broken up because she was seeing someone on the side.

April showers

Those whom God preserve

The Nubrella, which resembles a bubble wrapped around the user's head and shoulders, works by strapping on a shoulder support and extending a canopy around the head.

Weighing just over 1kg, it costs £40 and comes in either black or see-through style.

Inventor Dr Strabismus, 49, from Utrecht, said: "The major advantage is the wearer doesn't have to carry anything when not in use as it goes behind the head like a hood.

"The umbrella was long overdue for some innovation, now people can ride their bikes and work outdoors completely hands free while staying protected.

"Millions of people are required to work outdoors no matter what the conditions are and simply can't hold an umbrella and perform their tasks.

"We believe this will revolutionise the industry and are targeting people who can't use an umbrella or are too tired to hold an umbrella."

It's Dr Strabismus's world, we just live in it

Exhibit A

When Dmitry Argarkov was sent a letter offering him a credit card, he found the rates not to his liking.

But he didn't throw the contract away or shred it. Instead, the 42-year-old from Voronezh, Russia, scanned it into his computer, altered the terms and sent it back to Tinkoff Credit Systems.

Mr Argarkov's version of the contract contained a 0pc interest rate, no fees and no credit limit. Every time the bank failed to comply with the rules, he would fine them 3m rubles (£58,716). If Tinkoff tried to cancel the contract, it would have to pay him 6m rubles.

Tinkoff apparently failed to read the amendments, signed the contract and sent Mr Argakov a credit card.

"The Bank confirmed its agreement to the client's terms and sent him a credit card and a copy of the approved application form," his lawyer Dmitry Mikhalevich told Kommersant. "The opened credit line was unlimited. He could afford to buy an island somewhere in Malaysia, and the bank would have to pay for it by law."

Exhibit B

A council has defended spending £12,000 for a hologram "virtual receptionist" to greet visitors, saying it is cheaper than employing a person to do the job.

The “virtual assistant”, which has been named Shanice, will appear to sit behind a desk and greet visitors, but is actually projected onto a see-through screen.

Brent council, which is believed to be the first to use the technology, says that having a virtual employee will save £17,000 compared to a human receptionist, adding that Shanice can also be reprogrammed.....Shanice will direct visitors at the £90million civic centre wanting to register a birth or death, apply for a marriage licence or arriving for their big day, or attending to apply for citizenship.

The council boasts that “unlike a real receptionist, she's also got a 'touch screen' function”, meaning people can key in the reason for visit and receive a tailor made presentation.

However, Alison Hopkins, budget and finance spokeswoman for the opposition Lib Dems, told the Evening Standard: "There have been complaints about signage in Brent’s new civic centre but this is a startlingly expensive way of solving the problem.

Decorative rather than useful

Jerry Jalava has built a special prosthetic finger which contains computer storage for photos, movies and other useful files.

While the prosthetic looks like a normal finger Jerry can peel it back from the 'nail' and plug it into the USB slot on his computer using it as an additional hard drive.

The finger is not permanently attached to his hand meaning it can be removed when plugged into a computer.

The ingenuity of Christmas gifts has inspired Dr Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht. He has invented the perfect gift for anyone who knows what he doesn't want. It is described in an advertisement as an oblong wooden peg which props up a built-in sieve. The angle of the sieve makes it possible to sift things sideways, so that what falls through goes into a bucket clamped vertically to the wall.

I am demanding

Amazon having proven that, while commitments and hours in the day mean that there are only so many books I can read, there appears to be no practical limit to the number of books that I can buy.

On demand printing - as reported in the Times yesterday " IMAGINE walking into a bookshop and being certain that even the most obscure title will always be in stock" - can only make this worse.

Dr Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht is currently working on an automatic reading machine that will scan all the contents of a book and then pulp and recycle the paper; effectively closing the loop with on demand printing. He envisages a set up in which the output of the on demand Espresso Book Machine is fed directly into his Turbo Express Reader.

Plaudits from the Green lobby and orders from Local and central government are confidently expected.

fried chicken vs. coffee shops

From the Strabismus Research Institute:

With the assumption that the ratio of coffee shops to chicken shops is an indication of future prosperity (with a resultant uplift in house prices), then the following characteristics make an area “legitimately” up and coming:

High density of coffee shops

Low density of chicken shops

Low house prices

And the results say…

Move to Peckham!

As well as Peckham, other areas of interest for property buyers on the hunt for the next best thing are: Southwark, Woolwich, Isle of Dogs, Colliers Wood, and Willesden Junction.

With the first report into how to predict London house prices complete, further investigation into other factors can duly follow.

Currently in the pipeline, are studies of the ratio of £1 stores: bicycle repair shops, fluctuations in the street price of coriander, and the density of shops selling quinoa…

Coffee in the Wood is putting pounds in my pocket it seems.