We’ve seen some bizarre projects turn up on Indiegogo and other crowdsourced funding sites over the years. However, the Tongue Cover may well be the most bizarre ever.
The product is designed to cover the taste buds on the tongue so you don’t taste the disgusting liquid medicines you have to swallow when you’re sick. On the surface, it sounds like a pretty good idea.
As a parent, I’ve literally had to sit on my kids before to get them to take antibiotics. That said, I think the odds of getting a kid to slide what amounts to a condom over their tongue are just about as slim as getting them to willingly swallow their medications – if not worse.
I’m not trying to be humorous either, the pre-production prototype absolutely looks like a condom. The product is only recommended for single use due to hygienic and legal reasons according to the creator of the Tongue Cover.
You might think making tongue condoms would be an inexpensive proposition. Apparently, it’s not, the project is seeking $70,000(USD) by March 30, 2013, and as of this writing has raised a whopping $46. If you can’t live without this tongue cover, 25 bucks will get you 30 of them with an estimated delivery in May.
The analog clock will never go out of vogue for sure, but to turn it into an art piece will definitely require a fair amount of creative juices as well as resourcefulness. Case in point, the A Million Times project is an art installation by Stockholm-based studio Humans since 1982. You can say that A Million Times was inspired by their previous work, the Clock Clock project that boasted of two dozen analog clocks which functioned as a single unit. This time around, the A Million Times project will see the use of 288 clocks, and all of them are controlled by custom software on an iPad.
So, the dust over at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, has settled, and we are done with the second big show of the year, and are looking forward to what CeBIT has to offer next. Since we have reverted to regular programming, so to speak, how about a little teaser from the likes of Wacom? The famous digitizer tablet manufacturer has decided to use Facebook as the avenue of choice, posting a teaser that claims they will deliver a mobile tablet to the masses later “this summer” that will sport a pressure-sensitive professional pen (no surprises there), alongside a multi-touch capability and an HD display.
Google has recently updated their Play Books application, throwing in a bunch of new improvements of course. After all, what good is an update if everything else remained the same? Users who have given the new Google Play Books app on Android would most probably have noticed speed increases in addition to a new list view when it comes to your purchased digital tomes. Apart from that, you are also able to filter based on book type, which would be ideal if you have built up quite a reputable collection in order to narrow down a story in a long list.
I don’t know about you, but where I grew up, we were taught the Queen’s English, and abbreviations were very much shunned upon in our writing. The advent of text messaging on mobile phones and via IRC (yeah, there was no such thing as Skype back then, and to have an ICQ account was the “in thing”) helped evolve the English language, as short forms and the removal of vowels became the norm in an effort to be more concise in communications (as well as to save money by not passing the 160 character mark in a SMS). Most folks would lament that this makes modern day kids and adults less proficient at communication, but linguist John McWhorter begs to differ, touting that texting is actually a “linguistic miracle happening right under our noses.”
