TAG RESULTS FOR: disaster

If you don’t live in the Gulf area, it’s hard to really grasp the massive impact of the BP oil spill. You can look at all the satellite imagery and superimposed splotches on maps all you want, but to really understand the magnitude of this disaster, I had to use If It Was My Home. If It Was My Home is a website that uses Google Maps to visualize the spill planted over your local area. Just type in your... Continue reading

Ovi. What sounds like a menstruation period for a woman is actually Nokia’s attempt at an application store. According to TechCrunch and several other blogs, the service has launched but it’s hardly working. Search results yield nothing of value and the categories are all screwed up. Looking for a top ten apps list? No one’s been able to accomplish that yet. It’s not looking good for Nokia with a fucked up launch like this. Let’s hope that by Friday, Nokia... Continue reading

Los Angeles is a focal point for earthquakes and it’ll be no surprise to scientists when another one hits the San Andreas Fault in the future. When it comes to ground trembling geological faults, you’ve got to be prepared. That’s where Aftershock comes in. Aftershock is a game based on a 300-page U.S. Geological Survey that details how screwed L.A. would be if another devastating earthquake hit. The Institute for the Future and Art Center College of Design does not... Continue reading

Evacuations are sometimes mandatory in times when a possible disaster could take many lives. This all sounds well and good, but formulating these evacuation plans are not so simple. How do you organize a mass evacuation of a hospital in which there are many bed ridden patients, some of these patients possibly being cancer victims, burn survivors, amputees, or even midgets? A new product called the Evacusled, looks more like a product used in a mental institution then as a... Continue reading

If Evel Knievel had known about something like this Lifebag, who knows how many more brain cells he’d have left. Made for those into extreme sports (and possibly for those little bus riding helmet wearers I use to make fun of in school), the Lifebag is manually deployed, much like a parachute, producing a 150-liter shield in less than three seconds after deployment. But much like the hipDisk, how can we possibly take something that looks so silly, so seriously?... Continue reading

Not sure if you have ever noticed that some fluorescent lights do glow in the dark for a while after you’ve turned off the power, that’s because the excited particles (ions) take time to give out the light (photon) after being excited by electrical energy. NEC has extended this behavior of fluorescence material and apply it to their new Hotalook-alpha household lighting system, which was demoed at the Lighting Fair in Japan. This has captured immense attention in Tokyo as... Continue reading