Day: July 6, 2007

How to save a life…with Web 2.0

The New York Times has an article on J. N. Jayashree, who “did not want her husband to die the death of an Indian whistle-blower” and adopted a unique way of protecting him. How did she do it? By blogging.

“We’re creating a fortress around him — a fortress of people,” she said
in a telephone interview. “I wanted to inform the people that this is
happening, that my husband is a whistle-blower, so that it becomes the
responsibility of every citizen to protect him.”

For more, see the nytimes.com article: In India, Protecting a Whistle-Blower.


Tiny generator turns vibrations into electricity

I had an idea once: why not put some generator under roads and highways to turn all that displaced energy into electricity? Well, it looks like someone had a similar idea, and the good folks at Engagdet wrote about it.

Tiny generator turns vibrations into electricity – Engadget


On the need for Post Mortem P.R. flacks

If this Telegraph obituary is any indication, in the future, rich people should put aside some money in their will to deal with scathing obits such as this one! I have a quote here, but you really have to read the whole obituary! I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that after the funeral, the author went and stole the flowers from the grave site!

Count Gottfried von Bismarck | Obituaries | News | Telegraph

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.