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Internet Addict & Such

Right from the thin air...

When I told my little cousin who is 9 year old that I didn't have the Internet to play with when I was at her age, she gave such a shocked face. She simply couldn't imagine how we could entertain ourselves with just a couple of Lego pieces or toy tea sets. Yet here we are, all grown up without the Internet until perhaps a little later. And even then, we didn't have facebook. Having an email was like a pretty cool thing but simply non-essential.

Today, not having an email address seem like a miracle. But The Economist argues it's difficult to generalize the 'net generation' or to think of these kids as being much different from the previous generations.

Yet, there's something more miraculous than not having an email today. It is the fact that we are constantly being bombarded and surrounded with energy that goes unused - what we term 'ambience radiation'. Imagine if we could harness this little-but-constant stream of energy to power our low-power devices. It is now possible, and we could run our clocks, sensors, possibly our transponder devices as well. It'll be great energy savings and perhaps we could get our ordinary calculators to run on them as well.

Finally, while the straw hut didn't work against the Big Bad Wolf, it has proven steady during earthquakes. The tech quarterly from The Economist this time didn't disappoint.