The Economist‘s special report on smart systems in their November 4, 2010 edition has inspired me to read and learn about this fascinating movement. I’ve compiled a list of all the thought-provoking articles, gagdets, and business ventures I’ve seen – a snapshot of the flurry of ideas bouncing around in my head right now.

I’m sick of pulling my pants up while walking. And since it seems like no clothing manufacturer makes pants remotely close to 28×30, I’ve decided to learn to tailor my own trousers.

Right now I’m wearing a pair of jeans sized 29×30 (29-inch waist with 30-inch inseam). This pair took me half a day to find at my local shopping center, but its waist is still too large. It’s nearly impossible for me to find a decent-fitting pair of pants in most clothing stores. I’ll shuffle clothes hangers for hours looking for anything with a waist size under 30 inches. 99% of the time, 30 inches is the smallest I can find. That’s when I ask the shopkeeper to direct me to the children’s section.

Let’s suppose you built a potato cannon and invited some friends to fire it. You became tired of shooting potatos into the Hudson River so you started shooting signs, the occasional New York City rat, and 40-ounce malt liquor glass bottles. You wondered how high the potato could go if you fired it vertically, its maximum range, its muzzle speed, etc. If you enjoy accelerating starchy tubers up to insane speeds keep reading.

It’s interesting that the most read page on my blog is the one on creative ways to say happy birthday. There are numerous google searches that direct visitors to that page every month.

I’ve been told by the comments below that if you want to automatically post a happy birthday message for your Facebook friends, birthdayFB will do this for you.

This is a somewhat related post about how I’m trying to write a computer program that check’s Facebook for my friends’ birthdays and post a happy birthday wish on their wall. I can then schedule this program to run once a day, each time posting a canned response to their wall, and I’ll never have to worry about not saying happy birthday again.

Here’s an explanation of how you can set up your own Twitter bot.

UPDATE: I did this better in Python here

One day I tweeted “Treme & Engineering – Fight Club & Anti-Consumerism,“ and was immediately answered by a Twitter account IAmJacksBot whose user was “Tyler Durden.” After looking at this Twitter account, I realized it was run by a computer program that searched recent tweets for the words “fight club” and simply responded to them with a random quote from the movie. Needless to say, this is pretty awesome and inspired me to do the same with some of my favorite television characters.

I’ve set up a Jimmy McNulty Twitter bot. For those of you who haven’t seen The Wire, which is only the best television series ever, McNulty is an insubordinate Baltimore police detective who gets on everyone’s nerves. He’s an alcoholic, adulterer, womanizer, irresponsible father, and an all around asshole, but you gotta love how he pursues tough criminals so tenaciously.

My McNulty bot tweets an arbitrary quotation from the show every three hours. So how can you set one up?

Here’s a Python web scraper that gives you the full print edition of The Economist for free. Or you could go to their print edition that’s online and reject their cookies.

If you’re at your first job after college, I have important advice for you. If you get a chance to speak or present to a large audience at work, take it. I cannot overstate the significance of skills like public speaking, rapport-building, and simply getting noticed.

When I stand in front of a group of more than five people, I become nervous. My voice shakes, I talk too fast, I don’t maintain eye contact. But if I prepare just a little bit beforehand, my performance improves dramatically. Here are some simple but often overlooked points for delivering effective and coherent public speeches.

This Python web scraper extracts top New York Times articles and outputs a UTF-8-encoded .txt file.