Pauls musings and tidbits

The alarm clock that runs and hides so you’ll never oversleep again: “‘After the first few beeps I always hear a nice loud thump as it hits the ground running,’ wrote Paciga in an e-mail message.

The escaping alarm clock is here.

Clocky, as it’s called, hit the market Feb. 13, and is the result of inventor Gauri Nanda’s own battle with her circadian clock. The 27-year-old created the runaway alarm clock while she was a graduate student at MIT.

‘As a designer, it was obvious that the alarm clock needed to be improved, both in functionality and in personality,’ Nanda said. She was studying at the MIT Media Lab, which focuses on the intersection of technology and design, when she invented the clock. Her other inventions include pneumatic clothing with a detachable part that, when placed on the floor, senses that it is no longer clothing and inflates to become seating. ‘My focus was wearable technology,’ she said.

Her prototype Clocky was covered in brown shag carpeting and had big rubber wheels at either end of its body. When Nanda hit snooze, the clock would rev up, leap off the nightstand, land on the floor and roll around, its random wheel function moving the clock around until it found a suitable place to wedge itself — under a couch, for instance, or under the bed. There, the clock would crouch, waiting for snooze time to be up. Then it would ring again. The invention generated enormous media coverage.

‘A lot of customers have been anxiously waiting for the launch because they heard about Clocky over a year ago when he was only a prototype and I was still a student,’ Nanda said by e-mail.

The interest in the clock led her to start her own company, Nanda Home, www.nandahome.com, after graduating from MIT. Nanda and her few part-time employees have sold just under 3,000 Clockies so far, primarily by word-of-mouth. The current Clocky comes in white, aqua and mint, but Nanda is planning a shaggy version, too — in homage to the original prototype. Users have taken to posting YouTube videos of their Clockies waking up and running away, as if the alarm clock were a new, cute pet.

‘A lot of people who purchase Clocky are parents who want one for their child,’ she said. The target demographic for the $49 clock is the 18 to 30 crowd.”

(Read Original Article - Via The Detroit News..)

France opens secret UFO files covering 50 years - Yahoo! News: “PARIS (AFP) - France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.

The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists.

‘It is a world first,’ said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of ‘non-identified aerospatial phenomena.’

Known as OVNIs in French, UFOs have always generated intense interest along with countless conspiracy theories about secretive government cover-ups of findings deemed too sensitive or alarming for public consumption.

‘Cases such as the lady who reported seeing an object that looked like a flying roll of toilet paper’ are clearly not worth investigating, said Patenet.

But many others involving multiple sightings — in at least one case involving thousands of people across France — and evidence such as burn marks and radar trackings showing flight patterns or accelerations that defy the laws of physics are taken very seriously.”

[…] Other countries collect data more or less systematically about unidentified flying objects, notably in Britain and in the United States, where information can be requested on a case-by-case basis under the Freedom of Information Act. “But we decided to do it the other way around and made everything available to the public,” Patenet said. The aim was to make it easier for scientists and other UFO buffs to access the data for research. The website itself — which crashed host servers hours after it was unveiled due to heavy traffic — is extremely well organized and complete, even including scanned copies of police reports. To visit the website: www.cnes-geipan.fr.