Your cell phone is a bit fuzzy

I know they come up with some crazy things in Japan, but this is almost unbearable (haaa).

The Kuma Phone -- or "Bear Phone" -- by Wilcom is a stuffed bear that holds a SIM card and is an actual working phone. Users can even program four numbers into speed dial, which can each be dialed by pressing one of the bear's four paws. It also vibrates and makes custom noises for incoming calls, which can be answered and ended by pressing the animal's tail.

Call me crazy, but I thought we were tending toward sleek and shiny phones...

The item was recently shown at the Good Design Expo in Tokyo. Maybe it can help you get your bearings - haaa, get it? bear - rings. I love being corny.

So, How much for this fuzzy phone, you ask? Oh, only $500. What a rip - they could have at least picked a cuter bear instead of some raggedy-ass looking furball.

Chimp triumphs yet again

Please recall the case of the chimpanzee beating a bunch of college students in memory testing last month.

And if you thought that competition was mismatched--with the chimp easily owning the college kids--this story should prove once and for all that we should fear these animals and their superior cognitive abilities that will someday make us their slaves.

Ayumu the chimp was once again tested, but this time he was pitted against British memory champion Ben Pridmore, a man who can memorize the order of every card in a shuffled deck and memorizes 400-digit numbers on the weekends.

But still, the chimp reigned supreme.

[click here to try your hand at the testing Ayumu, the college students and Pridmore underwent]

The subject watches a computer screen on which numbers flashed up at various positions before being obscured by white squares. The object is to then touch the squares in order of the numbers they concealed, from lowest to highest.

The chimp got it right almost 90 percent of the time. Pidmore, on the other hand, came in with a 33 percent success rate.

Coverage of the testing will appear on a television program in London called "Extraordinary Animals." How embarrassing for Mr. Pidmore that he got beat by the chimp, but more so that he memorizes big numbers for fun.

Floating on Air

My laptop is cool and all, but getting my hands on the latest Mac laptop--the MacBook Air--would be phenomenal.

This thing is 0.76 inches thick when closed and 0.16 inches thick when open, and for comparison's sake, a regular DELL laptop is 1.26 inches thick.

(Photos courtesy of infoSyncWorld.com)

The computer also turns on as soon as it's opened, and it comes standard with an 80-gigabyte hard drive, with the option of a 64GB flash-based solid state drive as an upgrade. Because of the laptop's sleek structure, something had to be sacrificed, so the MacBook Air comes without a CD or DVD drive.

The Air will go on sale in two weeks and cost $1,800.

The laptop was revealed by Apple exec Steve Jobs at the Macworld trade show today. Jobs also unveiled an online video rental service that will allow users to download movies for $2.99 - $3,99 and watch them over a broadband Internet connection. They can also download and keep the movie for 30 days while having 24 hours to finish the movie once it's started.

If you didn't know it already, Apple is taking over the world.

Dear 8 pounds 6 ounces baby Jesus, newborn, not even spoken a word yet...

It seems as though even Jesus is up on his technology this year: The savior in his manger is being fitted with GPS technology to avoid Baby Jesus-stealing thiefs during the holiday season.

A Cincinnati attorney, who read a story earlier this month about people stealing nativity scenes in Florida, donated the Global Positioning System navigation device.

"I don't anticipate this will ever happen again, but we may need to rely on technology to save our savior."--Dina Cellini, site manager.

"Save our savior" - ahh, I love it.

Mary and Joseph will also be given some GPS loving, and a plexiglass screen will be set up as well.

This is one class I need to take

An article from Time.com caught my eye, and my peaked interest might be getting some inventive Parsons student an A.

The 15 students from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City are enrolled in a class called Internet Famous [click here to visit the blog], an experimental course in which the students utilize online strategies for distributing and promoting their art in our Google/MySpace/Digg/Facebook/blog-erific modern age.

Jamie Wilkinson teaches how to use headlines, keywords and tags to attract the attention of search engines, and how to use social networks to seek out the audience that will be most receptive to their content.

The students are then graded by a matrix, based on the amount of fame they receive. Wilkinson has three computers that scour the Internet, caught in a constant loop of what he terms "scraping" — constantly going through search engines, blogs, networking sites, video hubs and other sources for what's hot, what's new, and where his students stand, according to the article.

And this Time.com article certainly must have skyrocketed their hits--I tried to get on the Internet Famous Class Web site and I had the little Mac color swirly/hourglass cursor for like, five minutes. There must be thousands of people on this site at any given time!

I love this idea. It's pure genius. And my blog would probably get taken to school by these kids.

I am McBluffin

Hawaii and Wal-Mart are trying to blow up every single McLovin-wannabe's spot.

Mayor Mufi Hannemann, the mayor of Honolulu, demanded that Wal-Mart remove "Superbad" DVDs from shelves because of the gimmicky, completely fake driver's license of "McLovin" included in the packaging.

"It was foolish of the movie studio to include this prop in the DVD, particularly because it could be used by unscrupulous people to deceive others who are unfamiliar with our driver’s license." --Mayor Mufi Hannemann

Can you seriously not tell that this is fake?? There's a barcode on there that looks like it's from the back of the damn DVD.

The mayor announced this Wednesday and then commended Wal-Mart for its speedy actions Thursday. Good job, Wal-Mart. You treat your employees like crap and practice sexual discrimination, but you can certainly got a talent for pulling DVDs off shelves for really asinine reasons.

Chimps beat chumps

Monkeys may not have the sense to live in the human world (or maybe they're smarter for keeping to themselves), but a new study out of Japan found chimpanzee's to have better cognitive functioning than college students.

Three 5-year-old chimps took on college students in a series of memory tests involving numbers on a touch screen.

In the first test, nine numbers appeared on the screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there. While the chimps were no more accurate than the college kids, they could do the task faster.

In the second test, the best performing chimp was pitted against nine students, but this time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The chimp and students both scored 80 percent when the numbers were shown for 7/10s of a second, but when shown for 2/10s of a second, the chimps still scored about 80 percent, while humans scored a lowly 40 percent.

Maybe those college students were just hungover? I think they should get those chimps liquored up and then see how they do.

Update: MySpace Murder

Updating a previous item:

A Missouri prosecutor said today that no charges would be filed in the case of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old girl who hung herself last year after a MySpace user told her the world would be a better place without her.

It was an 18-year-old girl working for Megan's neighbor who started the "Josh" account.

"There is no way that anybody could know that talking to someone or saying that you're mean to your friends on the Internet would create a substantial risk. It certainly created a potential risk and, unfortunately for the Meiers, that potential became reality. But under the law we just couldn't show that." -- St. Charles County, Missouri, Prosecuting Attorney Jack Banas

Missouri's harassment statute says nothing about the Internet, and the stalking statute requires repeated conversations, so neither would apply in this case, Banas said.

Regardless, he said there is no doubt that parents should have stopped what was going on, and this does not mean that the responsible parties would not avoid punishment.

Cell me something good

Consumer Reports issued its annual survey of cell phone providers and customer satisfaction and found that Verizon and Alltell are among the best.

The magazine surveyed nearly 48,000 consumers and found that 70 percent of Verizon users were completely satisfied with their server, followed closely by T-Mobile. And despite being "the Home of the iPhone," AT&T showed less approval, though not as poor as Sprint, which came in dead last. To read more, click here.

All I know is that approval rating will never break the 90-percentile because cell phone service is horrendous--that's just the way it goes--but we would all fall into disconnect and perish without our texting and unlimited nights and weekends.

MySpace murder?

A 13-year-old Missouri girl hanged herself after a MySpace relationship with a fabricated teenage boy went sour. What is incredibly sick about this story is who was behind the phony account.

Megan Meier's family is seeking justice against a neighborhood family responsible for their daughter's death in October of last year. The mother of one of Megan's former friends created the MySpace account to see what Megan was saying about her daughter.

The mother, her daughter and another adult had access to the account and created a user named Josh who befriended Megan and corresponded with her for more than a month. On Oct. 15, "Josh" told Megan he didn't want to be her friend anymore and bulletin's surfaced saying things like, "Megan Meier is a slut. Megan Meier is fat."

Megan, who suffered from ADD and depression, hanged herself Oct. 16 and died the next day.

This is disgusting to me. First of all, MySpace is ruining the lives of teenagers across the country. This thing is life to them, and in some cases, death. [read about a 17-year-old in California who posted his suicide note on MySpace]. What's worse, though, is that these are adults involved in this. Adults who are so obsessed with what their children are doing online, but didn't think twice about harrassing someone else's child.

Megan's parents want the people involved to be prosecuted and I hope they get their wish. Officials are looking to pass a new ordinance related to child endangerment and Internet harassment, which could come before city leaders on Wednesday.

Thanks Dave!

Please touch!

Apple's new iPod Touch commercial that will premiere Sunday isn't actually theirs.

The new commercial was made by an 18-year-old student named Nick Haley. He took video from apple.com that showed the iPod Touch's features and the song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by a Brazilian band, CSS. He said he was inspired to make the commercial by a lyric in the song, “My music is where I’d like you to touch.” Pretty creative, huh?

Haley had put the video on youtube last month, where Apple reps saw it and contacted the student to come out and work on the new commercial.

First thought watching the youtube clip, "this is totally an Apple commercial." Haley worked with the commercial's creators to create a hi-def version of it, keeping the original vision intact. It's a great idea bringing regular customers into the advertising process; another brilliant move by the powerhouse that is AAPL.

The end result? Check it out Sunday during football games, Desperate Housewives or World Series game 4.

iLawsuit

So this woman is suing Apple because she bought the 4GB iPhone for $599 when it first came out and then the company slashed the price by $200 and discontinued the model. Apple offered to reimburse customers who put the iPhone within 14 days of the price cut and offer anyone else who purchased the 4GB phone $100 credit for Apple stores.

This lawsuit makes me mad. First of all, this is the risk you take when you act as--what they call in the marketing world--an "early adopter," a person who runs out and buys the newest gadgets, waits outside of stores, is willing to spend a lot of money on something shiny and new. Product lines are extended, models are discontinued and prices of things that aren't brand-spanking-new anymore will undoubtedly drop. You don't see anyone charging $700 for a rotary telephone, right?

Apple is a money making machine. What was she expecting?

Well...now she's expecting $1 million in damages. $200 probably doesn't make that much of a difference to someone who went out and bought an iPhone anyway. Ridiculous.