Technobabble

They’re not Homeless People, Dear, They’re Gamers It’s here (adult) kids, the first round of Sony’s Play Station 3 (PS3) and Nintendo’s Wii game consoles. The first units are obviously sold out, and some of the lucky early adopters can claim bragging rights that only hardcore Star Wars fans could in the past: having camped outside on the sidewalk for close to two weeks to be the first to experience the new product. The Wii hit shelves Nov. 15 and the PS3 came out Nov. 17. Japan’s 100,000 units of the PS3 sold out on its debut day, Nov. 11. These two machines have been the talk of nerd podcasts and forums for months, and if you haven’t read, the gaming industry is pulling in more ducats than the movie moguls of Hollywood. Even if you didn’t score one of the first of these units, be happy you don’t live in Europe where the PS3 won’t make an appearance until well into the New Year due to a shortage of Blu-ray laser diodes.

I’ll take a double manburger Researchers from Newcastle University and Kings College, both in Great Britain, have applied for a license to implant human DNA into bovine oocytes, or eggs, to produce human-cow hybrids. The idea, according to the online tech source The Register, is to free stem-cell research from its dependence on the painful and invasive procedure of “harvesting” eggs from people (is it painless to extract eggs from cows?). This human-cow hybrid would then be grown for a few days until the stem cells could be removed and the embryo destroyed. I can see the sci-fi movie for this technology already.

In (bad) good taste
I’ve been a vegetarian, for reasons regarding the longevity of the lives of nonhuman animals, for more years than I’ll admit, but I love this story. A company has made a shotgun shell that uses tightly packed seasoning instead of metal shot, which “seasons on impact.” “When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat, spreading the flavor to the entire bird. Forget worrying about shot breaking your teeth and start wondering about which flavor shot to use!” I’ll take two-dozen honey mustard shells, please.

Their tube Three 20-somethings who figured out a way to easily upload and share video via the Internet are now $1.65 billion richer after recently selling their Web site, YouTube.com, to Google. The site, of course, makes it possible for people to light themselves on fire and ride their bike down a hill, videotape it, upload it to YouTube and potentially achieve Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” worldwide. On top of the big sale, the three young men also won the Time magazine Invention of the Year for 2006. I could not have put it better than the excellently written Time article itself: “The real challenge old media faces isn’t protecting their precious copyrighted material. It’s figuring out what to do when the rest of us make something better.”