In Twitter this morning, @tatteredcover is asking how many people are moving from paper books to electronic ones.  I own a Kindle, but about 60% of my book buying is still paper.  I love the bookstore experience, and there’s nothing like thumbing through a paper book.  But my house is overflowing with the damn things.

I’ve been thinking for years that the ideal experience would be to have a book printing and recycling machine (the BookBox).  This box would be able to print and bind any book on the spot.  It would also have a slot for inserting used books to be recycled on the spot (composted, or whatever, with zero waste).  Plus maybe a USB port so you could hook up your favorite electronic reader and download a bunch of books before a trip.

In a world where the BookBox exists, there would still be bookstores: cafe + inventory for browsing + BookBox.  You can browse books while sipping an Oolong tea, then place an order to have a book printed on BookBox to take home with you.

Well, it doesn’t run in the browser, but it keeps itself to a single directory and runs from the command line, which is the next best thing.  The GIMPS project has been around since 1996 and harnesses the “power of 1000’s of small computers like yours” to discover new Mersenne primes, which are primes of the form 2^p-1.  46 Mersenne primes have been found, the largest having 12,978,189 digits.

The project was featured on NPR recently.  There are prizes to win for discovering the next prime (give it a few hundred Ghz-days and I might pay for the Mac Pro with this), but best of all, it doesn’t do creepy stuff like create groups and users on your system.  You just start it up the executable from a command line when you’re in the mood to hunt some primes and heat up the office.  Finally something to keep the Mac Pro’s CPUs busy:

linuxdevices.com:

Researchers at the University of Essex are using Linux and tiny embedded computer modules to build fleets of unmanned aircraft that fly in flocking formations like birds, while performing parallel, distributed computing tasks using Bluetooth-connected Linux clustering software…

(Via boingboing)

I bought an iPod Shuffle for my son last week, before a trip. Yesterday, it went through the wash (washer *and* dryer) and came out working perfectly. Cool.

This project at MIT …

allows pet owners to interact through their pets’ social networks. SNIF comprises inexpensive hardware that can be unobtrusively and transparently affixed to pet collars and paraphernalia in order to augment pet-to-pet, pet-to-owner, and owner-to-owner interactions.

More info in this PDF.

Very cool. The thing is, you have to find other dog owners who are a) inclined to install this hardware onto their dog’s collar and b) mutually inclined to conversation in the park. Hmm.

[via Susan Mernit]