Allow me to introduce you to George Sabados, he is an ex-barista, now a successful franchise, café business, and retail consultant as well as roaster trainer to the coffee industry. He is the former Executive Officer of the Australasian Specialty Coffee Association, and former Director of Barista College of Australia. He has judged at a number of national and World Barista Championship competitions around the world.

Mr. Sabados has ‘leet’ coffee skills, knows exactly how to create the perfect Espresso and make it perfectly every time; he has a great opinion article on CoffeeGeek: ‘Is this the end of the barista?‘.

The article is a breakdown of the latest ’super automatic’ espresso machines gaining in popularity over the last several years that are increasing profits in the coffee houses and suprisingly finding customers accepting of this over the personality offered by the baristas. He doesn’t claim to know what the future holds for the barista profession, but does provide some insight into the coffee market that I was not aware of before.

First, I told you about the very modern Bluetooth watch from Fossil, then the ultra-cool-retro Moonbase Commander watch.

Continuing on the theme of cool and potentially useless but geek-chic in watches, now Maywa Denki brings you a retro watch that goes above and beyond, it has an old style telephone rotary dial on the face of the watch that you must dial in order to find the time.

In Japan, to know the time you can dial 117 and the voice on the other end will tell you the time in hours, minutes and seconds. This incredible watch from inventors Maywa Denki will do the same by using the dial on the face of the watch. Just dial 117 and a woman’s voice will tell you the current time in Japanese! This cool gadget can also be used as an alarm clock, and to give you information about using the three digit dialing codes that directly link you to services — just dial the 3 digit code (e.g. 119 for fire, rescue and ambulance) and it will tell you the service associated with that number, a good way to check before you actually dial the number on a telephone itself. This watch fits any arm and is 24.5 cm long (9.5″), and comes with two tester batteries.

Jbox has it in stock, you can order it here and it’s only US$52. You can request an English owners manual as well, now that’s service! Of course, if you plan on actually using this watch, I guess it helps to live in Japan. Otherwise there’s no telling if your telephone time service is compatible with this phone or not, i’m not sure how extensible this feature is.

Found via TokyoMango

“Schrodinger’s cat” is simply an illustration of the principle in quantum theory of superposition, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. To further simply the term, it’s a thought experiement, a ‘what if’ hypothetical question that essentially asks “When does a quantum system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other?”

Schrodinger said:

“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid.If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The Psi function for the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

An Indian chess player, Umakant Sharma, participated in the country’s qualification rounds to get into the national chess championships. And he was winning games…lots of games. Accruing points on such a furious pace over an 18 month period that India’s chess tournament officials were suspicious of Sharma and his rivals were bemused.

Sharma was finally caught cheating after all this time. How did he do it?

He had stitched a bluetooth device into a cloth cap that he always pulled over his ears. He was communicating through the device with accomplices on the outside who were using a computer and feeding his moves to him.

Sharma has been banned from the tournaments for 10 years.

You can read the full Reuters story on eWeek.

downloadsquad.com is reporting on a Playstation emulator for WM 5 devices and probably other Smartphones. I gotta try this out on my Cingular 2125.