Smallist

First time I ever got a post idea from American Idol. The school-in-a-box is a suitcase-sized kit containing materials to teach 80 students. It’s packed with pencils, erasers, exercise books, multiplication tables and alphabet charts. Even 100 little pencil sharpeners. Each costs around $180, and it’s all very low tech, so you don’t have to find a creepy A/V guy to run the filmstrips.

And on an editorial note: American Idol, your charity logo looks like it’s for mayonnaise.

Bullitt it ain’t. But with bigger vehicles, you’d never be able to race down the curviest street on the road.

Remember the Chevy Trax from last week? The other two cars are out. So now alongside “Trax”, we have “Beat” and “Groove”. Get it? They’re all terms that the young people use to refer to their rock and roll. Either that, or they’re terms you use when your car gets stuck in a rut.

The Beat is inspired by the racing cars in movies like “The Fast and the Furious.” Why you’d name a racing car “beat”, I don’t know. The interior designer, presumably under physical threat from the PR team, says “The sound system and the pop-up juke box will always make you the life of the party.”

The Groove’s press release likens the car to a helmet, so I can only assume they’re aiming for the special ed market. It goes on: “Chevrolet Groove concept is contemporary and funky, but evokes classic Chevrolet heritage design cues like an upright windshield and prominent fender flares that give the Groove a strong, sturdy stance reminiscent of a retro hot rod.” Maybe it’s me, but don’t upright windshields and fender flares also lower your efficiency? If you want something with shitty mileage, can’t you go with Chevy’s standard offerings?

But most irritating to a Smallist should be this quote from the designer: “I wanted to get out of the mini vehicles stereotype that is characterized by a weak, insecure and ‘cute’ appearance, so that consumers can feel safe just by looking at the vehicle.”

Ugh. People buy small cars because they’re small, not because they look big. Does a Cooper look insecure? I don’t think so.

For good measure, here’s the Trax info.

The thing with Earth is, it’s completely lousy with life. The only area actually free of germs is the last thing you windexed, and that only lasts a few seconds. In fact, you’ve got about ten times as many bacteria as you do human cells in the body. Meaning, if I were to pluck a random cell out of your body, it’d almost definitely be a bacterium. Ew. (The bacteria cells are much smaller, which is why you don’t get turned away at restaurants)

Metagenomics is the practice of sequencing all the dna in a random sample of goo. Or water, or your spinach. Rather than provide the specific sequence for one specific species (sort of useless when there’s 10,000 species in your body alone), it looks for key markers across the set, to create a basic picture of the sample’s ecology, and what proteins are being made or metabolized.

Craig Venter of human genome fame is using his “shotgun sequencing” technique to sample ocean water around the planet on his ship. While it sounds like a perfect front for a James Bond villain’s evil plan, scientists are gaga over the possibilities of metagenomics. According to Professor Joe Handlesman of University of Wisconsin:

Metagenomics may be the most important event in microbiology since the invention of the microscope. And although that sounds extreme, it is an entirely new way of studying microorganisms and it gives us a completely different picture than by any of the previous methods that we use.

That quote’s from Living on Earth’s segment on the subject, which ran this weekend. And Slashdot’s talking about it as we speak.

Chevy wants to compete with Daimler Chrysler’s Smart cars, set to debut in the states in 2008. So they’re testing the waters with a trio of minicar designs, starting with the Trax. There will be two other designs, and to cheese things up a bit more, they’re going to have the young people vote for their favorite model… wait for it… online! GM is getting down with Generation Y! It’s like American Idol meets MySpace or something!

Still, I eagerly await the other two contestants. I want Chevy to make a great small car. The US needs small cars, and they need a hit. But this just seems hopelessly half-assed, like those commercials with Ronald McDonald snowboarding. Chevy, change comes from within. You don’t need a PR campaign, you need an 80’s movie montage.

The Smart car (above) is much cuter, and gives me the sort of product lust normally associated with Apple stuff. At 40mpg, the fuel economy is still a little ho-hum. But perhaps their focus on the product life cycle makes up for it, in the grand scheme of things.

Extreme nerds will tout this as the arrival of Mithral armor. However, this nano-chain-mail’s real strength will be its changing conductivity at different levels of stretch. From TFA:

“The first layer of fabric could consist of silicon islands with embedded circuits or sensors,” said Liu, who also is affiliated with the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Institute for Genomic Biology, and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory.
“The resulting fabric could generate electricity, detect movement or damage, or serve some other active role,” Liu said.

And finally you can dress up your toy knights in something functional! More at physorg.

According to the telegraph, the British Food Standards Agency is requesting that manufacturers make smaller portions more widely available. Specifically, it sounds like they want to see items like 100 calorie-packs labeled for individual sale, taking the place of typically larger vending machine products.

Sounds good. I know for a fact that “fun size” purchases by-the-bag are my caloric undoing. The problem is that the entire bag is a much funner fun-size. My solution, to date, has been to hide them in a high pantry where there’s a greater barrier to entry. But putting them in a vending machine would work too. That way I’d never get one — it’d get stuck on the spiral. And the collected money could go to the gym membership I’m not using.

If you needed a movie projector in your cellphone, Texas Instruments has your product. Or at least they will. They’ve managed to get a DLP projector and power supply down to 1.5 inches, and they’ve now encased it in a vaporware phonelike enclosure. Some day that could mean having a nice big screen whereever you are, and a flashlight to boot. As long as you don’t mind having a blocky phone.

I’d think a more reasonable use would be a laptop. Need a bigger screen? Hinge the display like a tablet and shoot a 20″ widescreen onto the cubicle wall. On the other hand, imagine being subjected to Powerpoint everywhere. The survivors would envy the dead.

When I think of what a “Xenoglaux” could be, I imagine some sort of oracular monster that can scan your brain and explode it. But it means “strange owl”, and in fact it’s a 5-inch tall owlet. An owlet being a miniature owl, just like towelette is a miniature towel. And it hasn’t been seen in the wild since its discovery in 1976… until February. Maybe it came out to warn us of the perils of global warning. Or to tell us to read books. Or not litter. In any case, I’m sure it’s going to guilt-trip us about something right before exploding our brains. More here.

For the pony set, there’s the world’s smallest horse, Thumbelina, who made the news for a new charity auction. Miniature horses are simply bred to be small, just like a toy-sized dog. But Thumbelina is a miniature who also suffers from dwarfism. The owners probably have to beat George Lucas back with a stick.

Finally, there’s Knut, the 15-week-old polar bear at the Berlin Zoo who has become a star in recent weeks. In a brilliant PR move, animal rights campaigners suggested euthanasia because he’s been reared by humans. But OMG LOL he’s adorable !!!

Put a GPS unit in your camera and it’s going to get a bit larger. That’s because it needs to crunch the numbers it gets from the satellites, which takes power and more circuitry.

These guys realized that your camera doesn’t need to know where the pictures were taken until you get home. So their solution is to record the satellite readings onsite when the picture is taken. The result is a very tiny chip, and very little power consumed.

Is this the best solution? I don’t know, I’d probably pick the slightly bigger camera that can tell me where I am. But then, modularizing the antenna is a smart design move. Given the huge number of general purpose computers out there, it makes sense to split the receiver from the brains, wherever possible. I could see this being used in smartphones. The iPhone, for instance…