Weird Invention: The Hovercraft Golf Cart

The new golf carts at a course in Ohio are a bit different than the old ones—for one thing, they fly.

Hovercraft Golf CartMost golfers dread hitting a water hazard, or hate to maneuver their golf carts around sand traps and other obstacles. But not the golfers at the Windy Knoll Golf Club in Springfield, Ohio. This summer, the course is unveiling two new hovercraft golf carts for their customers to use instead of the more conventional golf carts.

Windy Knoll will become the first course in America to offer BW1 Hovercraft Golf Carts. After seeing a video of PGA tour veteran (and 2012 Masters champion) Bubba Watson buzzing around in a prototype, the club’s management decided that hovercrafts were the future of golf, and that the future is now.

The Last Telegram

Here at the BRI we love to write about technology that was once cutting-edge,
and has now become obsolete and vanished from the scene. But we
seldom get an opportunity to witness the actual departure.

Last TelegramIn less than a week, the last telegram will be sent. The telegraph was the world’s first mass communication tool. First developed in the 1840s, sending series of electric pulses in Morse code (different combinations of pulses that corresponded to letters of the alphabet) along long stretches of electrical wire made instant communication a reality. The first telegram, sent on May 24, 1844, read, “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?”

A Weird But Great App: No More Kissin’ Cousins in Iceland

iceland cousins appThe United States is a melting pot. More than 300 million people live here, and most of us are either immigrants from another nation or the descendants of immigrants who came here within the last 200 years or so, from all over the world. The tiny European island of nation of Iceland is not quite so diverse. Distant and remote from mainland Europe, the country hasn’t expanded its genetic pool much over the last millennium. Result: All 300,000-odd residents of Iceland are related to each other.

The government of Iceland has intricately detailed its national genealogy, setting up a database that lists more than 720,000 people born in Iceland, including 95 percent of everyone born there since 1703, but going back 1,200 years. For example, everyone in Iceland—everyone—is related to a man named Jon Arason, who died in 1550.

With everyone related, that makes dating a little awkward—nobody wants to date their first cousin. Your eighth cousin? Well, that might be okay, but first cousin? Gross. That’s why an Icelandic computer programmer named Arnar Freyr Aoalsteinsson developed an app called IslendingaApp. Essentially an interactive version if the Icelandic genealogical registry, two people who have the app tap their phones together, and the app will tell them how closely they’re related. The app’s slogan: “bump the app before you bump in bed.”

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A Weird But Great App: No More Spoilers on Twitter!

Tired of spoilers on online? What you need is a ‘No More Spoilers on Twitter’ app! Gone are the days of watching a TV show on the channel it airs at the time it. Most American homes now have some form of “time shifting” solution when it comes to TV, from the good old VCR to digital video recorders like TiVo to watching the shows online, either a couple days later via Hulu or a couple of months (or years) later in season-long viewing binges on Netflix.

A diehard fan of a show will watch it as soon as possible—when it airs—and many of those fans like to share their thoughts online, while it airs. So if you’re not going to get around to watching Mad Men the night it first airs, you’d better not go anywhere near Twitter. Mad Men fans will discuss plot points, twists, and, to use the parlance of the Internet, “spoil it.”

No More Spoilers On Twitter AppBoston teenager Jennie Lamere loves to use Twitter to connect with her friends and follow celebrities, but she hated how she would often inadvertently find out the results of her favorite show before she watched—the reality program Dance Moms. So for a student-computer-programming contest, she designed a Twitter application called Twivo. The program works like this: You install it and tell it what shows you don’t want to know anything about. Twivo then blocks all references to the show on your Twitter feed—the text is blacked out—no more spoilers on Twitter. Lamere won the contest; the app may be available to the general public in just a couple of months…hopefully before Breaking Bad starts up again.