Wildlife

• Mimic, Parrot Activity, Tag Team Wildlife Research*

Arjun - idea: motion sensor input for interactive games, and as a way to trigger wildlife biology research, by setting a laptop out, having it imitate the mating calls of something, and when something comes in range -- trigger the video camera to record? too bad the camera can't swivel in a 360-degree arc. instead of voice activated recording -- critter activated recording? might work best with two laptops playing tag team. "watcher" laptop set far enough out to capture scene, "lure" laptop generates mating call (and hopefully doesn't get pooped on). maybe a third laptop can be used as a live control mechanism triggering the recording and sounds on laptops 1 and 2. could be tested with cats, who are quite curious. fun if laptop could be set on inexpensive lazy susan and a little robotic spider could walk it around a 360 degree arc. I guess motion sensor not needed with 3 xo array. Still an autonomous xo wildlife researcher could be interesting. Especially if it had ai and could learn the calls around it -- like a Parrot.

• Open Source Mindstorm*

Ha! I guess we need an open source lego mindstorm equivalent. Makes me wonder if there is a Lego foundation and if they'd develop and fund 100,000 little robotic kits if dev community helped. One would think they could make enough profit from xo and eeepc to cover it.

• Brain Machine Interface*

also analog input might be nice for paralyzed children to be able to use laptop via a cheap brain-machine interface. if anyone interested in this latter feel free to email me offline and we can continue conversation with friend who developed such a device (via usb) for pcs which does *not* require electrodes to be implanted (it mediates inferred electochemical variations via biofeedback and works - he had a quadraplegic driving a wheelchair on national tv). and i think he is open to porting it to xo. i think he has it patented but maybe he'd open it on behalf of the handicapped children of the developing world. one could only hope.

• Batchat*

I'm sorry I can't help myself. would it be ridiculous to have a device that could receive/transmit the echolocative and communicative frequencies of bats? so kids could chat with bats? I guess this would be some kind of solar powered usb-radar station? perhaps combined with thermal imaging? I guess this is wildlife biology and expensive but still.

• Whalechat/Dolphin Dongle*

Could you dangle a multi-frequency transmitter/receiver over the edge of a boat, which could emit whale/dolphin sounds as a method of attracting them, and then also record them and send them up the line to the xo? (like Dory speaking to the whale in finding nemo.) if the "line" itself were long enough, and could be made to transmit through some vibratory mechanism like cellphones use, it might be long enough to generate the lower waves. a flute generates tones through adjusting the size of a column of air, so perhaps the vibratory area could be variable somehow, or you could just have markers and dip it variably into the water. or perhaps kids on one side of a like could chat to each other if their xo's didn't mesh, by dipping the dolphin dongle in the water. they did actually recently decode whale communications into i think 41 discreet kinds of messages. wouldn't be surprised if dolphins have the same thing. you could have kids teaching dolphins how to program. Douglas Adams would like that.

• Xo scuba*

Could you encase an xo in a cheap plastic sphere, and use some cheap cable to transmit the video feed back up to another xo?

• Xo snorkel*

or could you just turn the xo on, set it to record, and with an airtight sphere and a weight in the bottom, just set it down into the water enough to look?

• saving the earth*

back to analog: mayhab there are cheap sensors/biochips that could enable children to take alkalinity ph balance readings, measure pollen, pollutant content (ding ding ding). i suppose this is expensive but wouldn't it be nice to have an xo getting down to the ppm level with contaminants and toxicity, in air, water and soil samples, and to have some kind of ultraviolet light emitter to purify water and kill unfriendly bacteria and viruses?

tekelsey "at" gmail "dot" com