etech08 exposing the APIs of invisible things in pandoras box

Left the hermitage for a couple days and pandora box lunched it at etech08 an oreilly thing in san diego. A fun blend of terror and optimism. Of note: drugs in water leads to Drink Pee, a home based pharmaceutical filter thats turns your own urine into safe houseplant fertilizer; the api’s of invisible things and hardware hooks; opensource hardware and diy tv-b-gone from adafruit; diy apocalypse from bre pettis; passively multiplayer online gaming (pmog); socialbomb open source hardware kits for real-life facebooking; botanicalls diy plants twitter; hiding democracy in lolcats; doing an endrun around the many problems in the medical industrial complex; and innumerable other unmentionables. An interesting abundance of engineers who love to get their hands on so much data about people that its like rat-under-the-scalpel syndrome. Many heuristics about how people look under the statistical microscope. And let me tell you: we look small. A hypothesis supported by the many talks about our global energy consumption and ecosystem challenges. Doom and gloom, or optimism and fervor?