It doesn't always have to be an app.

A young designer from Eindhoven has created these beautiful toys to be used in hospitals to explain procedures to children. His toys contain the 4 most commonly used pieces of medical equipment: X-ray, CT-scan, ECG and an echocardiograph. Each machine has light and sound so the kids get a pretty good idea of what is going to happen to them. Now all he needs is a business angel to finance him. (copyright Hikaru Imamura, Fast Company)

Avinash Kaushik, the usability guru, tweets about WTPh, What the Phonics, street installations in Kopenhagen, that are attached to streetsigns to help people pronounce the streetnames.

I understand why he would find that a great idea: for foreigners all streetnames in most European cities are unpronouncable (or how pronouce Jan Van Rijswijcklaan (Antwerp), Chemin de la voierie des trèfles (Paris), Prilaz Dure Dezelica (Zagreb and I don't have special characters to make it more unreadable) or Haarlemmersdijk (amsterdam)).

So yes, it's a great idea but there's only one drawback: you have to have found the street first before you can learn how to pronounce it's name. Which doesn't solve the problem of having to look for that streetname you can't pronounce in the first place.

WTPh? - What the Phonics from Andrew Spitz on Vimeo.

The Web fought Nature and ...Nature won

Most people find it scary but I find it oddly comforting: Nature ran into the Web twice in two days and won convincingly each time. 


First there was this devastating weather in the US. They didn't call them wild storms for nothing: they left sweltering heat and massive power outages in their wake. Not only were millions of people affected, one of the casualties has been the Internet. Power interruptions at the big data center operated by Amazon.com in Virginia crashed other popular websites that rent out Amazon's computers. No Instagram, no Pinterest, no ..
how many lawyers would be pouring over SLA's and contracts right now? The Cloud being blown away by clouds: there is justice in that.


And then Nature pulled another one.

On July 1st a leap second was added to adjust global world time as close as possible to the solar time or the Coordinated Universal Time. Sensitive computer systems that run on milliseconds don't like leap seconds at all. Google was prepared but others weren't: they're not as technology geek as Google I suppose. LinkedIn, Foursquare, Stumble Upon, Gawker, ... they all went down. Mozilla 'choked on the leap second': not tech-savvy enough? 


Or, to paraphrase Forbes Business: locusts are next :-)