toys compared to what is used for deep science, but fun and useful in their own way, often as an intermediate step before further processing or analysis, though they are gaining in capabilities. 20 or 30 years they’ll be offering a USB one for xmas for the kids.

Iunno about you, but I came.

edit: it seems like this may be a prank. edit #2: it’s not, I found it and more videos on blogs.adobe.com, so I can only assume they’re legit. CS5: When you see it, you’ll shit bricks.

Glad the redesign was easy to do, as all I’m gonna wanna do around here now is spam the videos and pictures ya’ll love.

I will be spending my days reacquainting myself with Linux and various related systems for the aforementioned job. It’s gotten a lot more user friendly but you still gotta know what you are doing or you are gonna be lost (even with some googling you may be lost). Of course I’m checking out the server version in a virtual box right now. The desktop GUI version is even more friendly than the “console will make you grow man hairs” server version.

My compliments to Intel and the i7 processor. Watching videos, running a complete second OS under my first one, 16 or so tabs open in Chrome, Team Fortress 2 running in the background and it’s not even using the processors. I think I’m gonna start up a new virtual box and run ubuntu desktop, see if i can get them all up at the same time and talkin to one another.

Why? Dunno, cuz I can? To the downloadodrome!

Indeed, the very ease with which pico projectors can be used to create social awkwardness could be a significant feature. Alexander Besher, one of the organizers of the pico projector film festival, thinks there could be significant use of pico projectors in political protests. Picture a nighttime war protest where hundreds of people have pico projectors showing graphic images of devastation on every available surface.

This was kinda ancillary to the article but man, what a great idea. Not one I’ve ever really heard before, either, but I can think of so many uses for these things now. Muwahahaha.

The first two episodes deal with Turing’s contribution to chaos theory and biology, and his tragic downfall at the hands of the British jurisprudence system. A very good watch all the way through, 10 minutes at a time.

update: i’m pretty sure at least some of the music is by Philip Glass. The part at the end of part 2/beginning of part 3… is just amazing.

techreport reinforces my belief that the internet is made out of kittens and pure magic. I got some new gear on sale and will have a new rig built by next week. Best of all? Thanks to my old system still being current and some other piece of luck, i’ll actually end up with a brand new computer and cash in my pocket – all thanks to randomly winning this free motherboard. Go Tech Report!

Courtesy of International Ocean Station

And it’s getting close to as large as possible with IPv4.

However, with IPv6, it can get, I think, 2^96 times larger. Whatever the difference between the capacity of a 32 bit number and 128 bit number happens to be.

Yeah, the singing robot was cool, but a talking piano? Now that’s tricky. The narration is in German but it’s caption-titled so you can get the gist of what’s going on. It’s a real, old-style mechanical piano, not a synthesizer. It requires a giant piano keyboard sized machine to play it. But really, how cool is that that it’s even possible?

It’s not perfect by any means but we’re already on our way down that slope. I gotta get myself ahold of this Vocaloid software so I can make music with computers singing love songs to one another.

I’m thinking maybe pockets of a substance with a similar kinetic effect (water and cornstarch hardens on impact – mix some up, put it in your fist, and smack it if you want to believe your own eyes), layered across a body, say, like armor, would provide a flexible outer layer that would harden on any sudden impact, absorbing kinetic energy.

A new ultrasound device, used in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allows neurosurgeons to precisely burn out small pieces of malfunctioning brain tissue without cutting the skin or opening the skull. A preliminary study from Switzerland involving nine patients with chronic pain shows that the technology can be used safely in humans. The researchers now aim to test it in patients with other disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

Seriously, they now have a system to do some brain surgery without opening a skull. That’s hot. That’s super-hot. They’re already removing small tumors and what not, now it’s precise enough to work on the brain without damage to surrounding tissues. I don’t think this will invalidate the single-hole docbot I wrote about earlier in the day, at least not any time soon, but this is still an exciting development. And no matter what, the docbot working on a skull still requires holes in the head, always a dicey prospect.

This is Star Trek style medicine.

University of Glasgow researchers used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to reveal how the girl’s brain had rewired itself in order to process information from the right and left visual fields in spite of her not having a whole brain. The right hemisphere in the girl’s brain failed to develop in the womb.

Normally, the left and right fields of vision are processed and mapped by opposite sides of the brain, but scans on the German girl showed that retinal nerve fibres that should go to the right hemisphere of the brain diverted to the left.

Further, the researchers found that within the visual cortex of the left hemisphere, which creates an internal map of the right field of vision, ‘islands’ had been formed within it to specifically deal with, and map out, the left visual field in the absence of the right hemisphere.

Yeah, it’s for real – she is missing half her brain from birth, but her optic nerve grew over to the other side of the brain, and the visual cortex created special regions to deal with sight from the other side of the head.

This is something our scientists wont be able to achieve for a while. On the other hand, she has quite a lot of space to pack in some neural hardware should she choose to augment herself later in life, when the technology is fully emergent.

In ten years, you’re going to have the equivalent of .5 terahertz in your pocket computer (that thing that you also use as a phone) in today’s processing ability (some amount of mips, wont actually be 500 GHz most likely, will be different technology, probably massively parallel). It’s likely to be so computationally dense you might not need a personal computer, you’ll probably have a central house computer, if everything hasn’t been moved into clouds for cooling efficiency.

Some of the video is a fairly well-worn retread of the familiar Kurzweil rhetoric. The Kurzweil Talk@Google. Then there’s new stuff, weird stuff. Butt stuff. Stuff about China, Iran. Very interesting. Exponential growth of cellphones: 10 years for first billion, 3 years for second, 1 year for the 3rd billion… now ubiquitous in Africa….

Future’s gonna be good, son, future’s gonna be good. Glad we have crackpots like Kurzweil husbanding the birth of the singularity.

I understand what big K means when he says “The pace of change will become incomprehensible to the merely human.” Currently most “big software” updates come about once a year. The biggest come once every few years, with Herr Bloatiest coming out once every 5 years or so with new technology (rather than new window dressing). Google comes out with software updates whenever – and usually quite fast. 2 versions of Chrome within 8 months, pretty quick for what isn’t really a flagship product – it’s definitely one of those things that older people don’t want to get used to. Some people are so resistant or unaware of change that they still use IE 5 or 6. Currently, humans write all the code, but Google writes extra code to debug the software semi-automatically (you’ll instantly know which function is broken) – they’ve gotten more out of what their system can do that others. That’s why they have a competitive advantage. Even moving as slowly as a corporate juggernaut, they still appear lithe and nimble compared to most large, established software houses. There will be a next Google, only it wont be a Google, it will be pregoogle < Google < GoogleNext, where GoogleNext is as at odds with Google as Google was at odds with the world when it first hit the wires. How quick will their development cycle be? How will mind
-computer interface technology and fuller human-form based interfaces speed up the development of software, especially video game software, and how will the interfaces effect the way they are utilized in the world, playing video games, making music, creating art?

Stuff you heard about 10 years ago as sci-fi is becoming reality today. Stuff you hear about today as sci-fi will be reality in 5 years. Then 2.5. Then 1.25.

At some point, we’ll have print-on-demand (assemble-on-demand?) computers – microprocessor technology will evolve so fast that you’ll just have a computer custom assembled from the latest blueprints, there wont be huge factories pumping out millions because by the time the first generation has finished printing the nth generation would be ready to fab.

I like how he ends it, “If you can hang in there, we may get to see the remarkable century ahead, and I look forward to working on it with you.” No doubt that he’ll be there.

Feed reeders will probably have to click through for the video, but it’s worth it, especially if you’re interested in design. Some choice info from the video to whet your whistle.

design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order – victor papanek

some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems.

obviously designs do solve problems, but so do dentists. design is about cultural invention. – jack shulze

culture is “the things that make life interesting” – bruno minari author, ‘Design is Art’

A macroscope is…. “something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together.” John Thackera

possibly in space, the approach to vegetables might be different. did that every strike you, because we are thinking of 3 dimensional vegetables. Maybe in space, where you’ve got sunlight all around, you might get a 2 dimensional tomato, it might be one million miles long, thin as a sheet of paper, aimed towards the sun. Congressman Fulton, 1959.

We are as gods and might as well get used to it. Whole Earth Catalog, issue 1, sentence one.

“People who are native to the web” – Matt Webb

Sourced via the ever strange and wonderful Mr. E.

This guy gets it. He really does. We need to work with the animals who have adapted to the human ecosystems we have built for ourselves. The more we fight them, the trickier they get. So, if you can’t beat them… ?

That’s right, make them join you. Assuming the embedded object fails (because the WP video plugin doesn’t have TED talks covered yet) here is the link to this amazing video. This was all discovered by an amateur hacker and writer, not an actual scientist.

Crows and ravens are amazing. I need one of these crow vending machines, I want some crow-friends.

“Years later, they came back, and the crows remember them. Lesson: don’t piss off a crow”

I mean, holy shit, crows in Japan drop nuts into traffic, and then WAIT FOR THE LIGHT to go in the street and collect the cracked nuts when the cars are stopped by the light.

Wow, these little critters are definitely under-utilized by the society to which they’ve attached themselves. I mean, think about it. We didn’t domesticate cats – they moved in with us. That’s why they’re still so independent. Crows are doing the same thing. Now if only I could figure out how to get a dead wasp or roach or pincher bug to work the vending machine, and I’d be set – especially wasps since they’ve colonized our dying shed.

Looks like it has a infrared webcam for a face. I dunno what percentage of the snake was printed, but at this juncture it appears to be only the structural parts, no motors or electronics.

Some day, though…

And anyone who’s read “The Diamond Age” (N. Stephenson’s last good novel), the, uh, whatever they were called, the matter compilers, those were basically 3d printers. I liked how he described them as great thwacking monsters – I guess in the 80s, rotary mechanical vacuum pumps were about all that was available – the newer pumps just hum (diaphragm) or whir (turbomolecular pump) or make no noise because they’re oil diffusion, cryogenic or getter-ion pumps. And to do nano-scale engineer, those thwacking mech pumps do NOT provide enough vacuum – a turbomolecular or oil diffusion pump would be needed at the very least (to attain ‘high’ vacuum, ~2×10^-6 torr) or possibly the cryo or getter ion pump (to attain ultra-high vacuum, ~10^-11 torr), otherwise the gas molecules bouncing around in there (in low vacuum, or 10^-2 torr) will destroy or otherwise fuck with the nano-self-assembly process.

And I know, because I’ve had to study this shit – and I’ve coated things with nano-crystalline gold to make it conductive, and that requires high-vac systems filled with 10Kvolt ionized argon plasma that knocks single gold ions (a single, unattached charged atom is an ion) off of the target (i dunno why the target is where things come from and not where they go, it’s just the nomenclature) and shoots them in straight lines on to a sample, to make it conductive for the SEM analysis process.

A portable ‘pocket’ phonograph circa 1930. Be pretty fun to scan one of this in and make a replica case for, say, an external hard drive (bonus if you can fit the hard drive into the workings without interrupting them).

I really hope the video comes through the feed this time, otherwise the blog post is just going to look like random unrelated rantings and one will have to click through to the website to watch the video. Even if you have to do so, if you enjoy electronic music of any kind, watch this video. Even if you don’t enjoy electronic music, check this guy out.

Found on a blog called ‘deadact‘ – dedicated to making fun of dj’s who pretend to perform live with laptops playing sets that would go on to the end even if they had a heart attack clowning around smoking behind the keyboard. They like to give the occasional props to actually *good* artists.

This is a concept demo of what would be possible once a high-speed hybrid infrared and visible light projector were available. As mentioned above, DLP technology has the potential to perform high-speed tracking simultaneously with image projection. With this type of location tracking, we could track points on non-rigid geometries and project accurately onto flexible and foldable surfaces as well as obtain stylus input. This achieves a vision commonly found in science-fiction films where an individual can summon a large display from a pocket-sized device.

What else can you say but damn it feels good to be a gangsta?