Daily Mail has a story about new Philips CT scanner that can produce awesome full-body scans of the whole body in a minute (via Gizmodo).

The machine costs $2 million which sounds like a big sum but I realized it actually isn’t that much. For example, the city of Helsinki is considering building a massive drive-through tunnel under the city where the latest projected cost (that I heard) was 750 million Euros. $2 million is measly 1.35 million euros which means that at the cost of the tunnel, you could purchase 200 of these machines (271 million euros), then use, say, 350 millions to build a massive scanner complex and then spend 130 million on hiring people to man the machines. (Obviously you’d need to invest a lot more to pull this off but humor me here.)

At 10 people / machine / hour for 7 hours a day, 300 days a year the entire population of Finland could be scanned in about 15 months.

A system like this would more or less completely eliminate surprises from cancers and various blood clots, which in turn would probably save a hell of a lot of money on the long run.

Given that this would be possible to pull off already now, I guess full body CT for all will happen in 10-15 years, when the scanners have dropped significantly in price. Can’t wait to see what I look inside! :D

Below’s a video capture of an Apple “Don’t give up on vista” ad. I generally think banners should just go away as an form of advertising but if all banners we created as smartly as this one, I’d be glad for them to stay. (Hit the link if you don’t see the Youtube embed.)

I just had a revelation on what’s wrong with Nokia’s smartphones right now. It’s not the phones as such, the technology is very cool – it’s the way Nokia thinks about the phones which then reflects to the customer experience.

My N95 broke during the Austin GDC (screen went blank for no obvious reason) so I had to take the phone to service. I couldn’t backup the phone without the screen so the service order had “Do not delete data” written in VERY LARGE type. So, obviously when I got the phone back a month later, the software had been upgraded and all data was wiped, including all contacts, photos, messages, installed apps, the lot. For some reason the new software only includes butt-ugly hard to use visual themes, too, so I hate my phone now.

You’re probably nodding and thinking “Yeah, that tends to happen when your phone is serviced” and that’s exactly what’s wrong with the phone industry! Nokia is selling N95 with the slogan “It’s what computers have become” so I expect them to treat my phone like it’s a computer. If I take my laptop to the service, I wouldn’t imagine the service people would format the hard drive and tell me I should be happy that they upgraded the OS version. That just doesn’t happen.

So, challenge to Nokia. Try to change the mind set of everyone dealing with your customers to treating the phones like they’re computers. This means quick service and absolute no loss of your customer’s data.

Update: I found a positive side effect of the software update – the GPS now suddenly works. It used to take up to 30 minutes for the phone to get a lock under an open sky, now the locks seem to happen in under 30 seconds.

Sometimes, I just get pretty pissed off by market prices differences. I’d like to get the Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8 lens but guess what – the Finnish average price is around 1550 euros ($2200 US) while the US price in the better web stores is $1130.

That’s a frickin’ 100% price increase for Finns! Even if I account for the 22% tax here, that’s still a massive price difference. I bet the local Canon representatives are happy but I’m just feeling screwed.

Incidentally the same goes for Garmin GPS units where the better ones cost around 150% more here than in US. Apple used to do the same but I have to give them some kudos for actually adjusting their prices in the last couple years.

If you do programming and like The Office or Dilbert, you might enjoy Daily WTF, a “blog” about programming brainfarts, some of which explain the weird issues found in software. Part of the series is screenshots of funky error messages and views.

The reason I’m writing this I just saw something pretty funny. I just tried to reserve time to get my car’s tires changed to the winter tires – check the date for my reservation schedule.

I think people used to have carts with horses back then.