Word: gadget
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
British air-traffic-control transmissions have been interrupted by wails from a baby monitor, a gadget that can also inadvertently eavesdrop on phone calls...
...links to cool, odd and interesting things happening online and off-like the bit about the engineering student who cobbled together an air conditioner using a fan and a bucket of ice water, and the Florida couple who found the image of Jesus on a Lay's potato chip. Gadget news, kitsch, digital art and disturbing consumer trends are all fair game for the Boing Boing team, which solicits, and vets, suggestions from the audience...
Politicians are no strangers to hot air, which may explain why so many are rushing to condemn a new gadget that enables users to inhale vaporized alcohol. The contraption, known as AWOL (short for Alcohol Without Liquid), looks like an asthma inhaler and reputedly gets booze to the brain faster. Eighteen states have introduced legislation banning the device, and last week Kansas became the second state (after Colorado) to sign its bill into law. "This is the equivalent of putting a funnel at bars, inviting people to get drunker quicker," says Florida state senator Mike Haridopolos, who cosponsored that state...
...recent episode, a character becomes hooked on the Sony PSP, gets in an accident and hovers between life and death, only to find that the PSP was created by God as a weapon against Satan. Any cartoon that can successfully lampoon the right-to-die issue, an overhyped gadget and our apocalyptic obsessions at once is, like that PSP, heaven sent...
...winter. It may be that after Hiroshima, Americans were no longer so keen on their seemingly infinite capacity to make things work, that the technological success of Hiroshima took the heart out of American can-do self-esteem. (At Los Alamos, a code name for the Bomb was the "gadget.") On this basis, one might work up an elaborate psychological theory explaining the subsequent fall of America's industry and the rise of Japan's as products of a national guilty conscience. But the American impulse to deplore and fret over mechanical progress has always been as strong...