Those of you who know are smiling at that last line there. YES IT WAS A WEB DESIGN JOKE I AM A NERD.

A pretty eye opening layman’s explanation of the human urge to conform even when they doubt what they are conforming with.

Probably the most important part is when he quotes this scientific study that says that an opinion repeated by the same person three times is as effective as the same opinion repeated by three different people. Kinda explains Faux News.

Filmed entirely with the 5DII. Also, apparently the season finale of House was shot entirely on the 5D. When these cameras go from capturing 8 bit to 10 bit or higher video (they currently do 12 or 14 raw stills but no option exists that I know of to engage ‘raw’ video, at least on my T1i) all bets are off. RED captures in raw so you get that extra depth, though Canon’s digic chips do a pretty good job of cramming their sensor data into 8 bits intelligently (once you figure out where to set the white balance, anyway).

Sumo wrestling filmed in tilt-shift stop-motion. A yokozuna is there (dunno if there’s still more than one, there was for a while) – he’s the guy that comes out in the big white belt and dances for a while around 2 minutes in. The even have some comedy sumo. I know tilt shift is trendy and all the rage right know, but I enjoy it and this is a fairly unique subject matter for the format.

Hot chick and wordnerd.

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.

and

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.

Fans of early 20th century design and graphics, take note.

Now, after my wedding website is finished, I will resume work on a new neko front-end. I’ve also got my mojo working for attaching different stylesheets to specific pages on the website, so I can have all sorta fantsy stuff going on.

These measurements of the cosmic microwave background — a faintly glowing relic of the hot, dense, young universe — put limits on proposed alternatives to the standard model of cosmology and provide further support for the standard cosmological model, confirming that dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of everything in existence, while ordinary matter makes up just 5%.

So this means that we’re going to have to re-think the Kardashev civilization scale. 95% of the Milky Way can’t even been seen except by inference with our current tools.

There could be a type 3 civilization all around us and we might not even know it. Actually, according to the Kardashev scale, there could be 19 type 3 civilizations – A type 3 uses the ‘average’ power output of a whole galaxy, which is just the 5% we can see….

A couple proposals.

Maybe Einstein was right when he said that everything happened in an instant, and time is just how we perceive that. Maybe that ‘hidden’ 95% is the rest of the history and future of the Milky Way, in time. Since currently we only experience time linearly, we cannot test this preposterous idea with our instruments.

Perhaps string theory is right, and that other 95% are in higher or lower dimensions we can’t see.

Perhaps ‘light’ matter/energy is just like bits of data on a ‘dark’ matter/energy hard drive platter or bits in a quantum computer (qubits). Any data that exists in your computer cannot perceive the computer existing around it, though it could infer that the computer was there (assuming such things are possible, anyway – just stretching for a metaphor).

Buy this company. Buy it now. Buy it for a beelyon dollars if you have to. Give a free copy to all Windows 7 installs, downloadable over Windows Update. Sit back, watch Apple cry in the corner.

Then the real strategy begins. Put the same thing on Xbox. Start a 3d widget/app store – this part is especially important – really get on the ones with virtual stock displays so you can watch bar graphs rise and fall in real-time 3d, or for server admins to have little morphing 3d representations of the health of their networks chilling in the corner where they can keep an eye on things. Wedge it into the business atmosphere as being able to provide representational situational data for their applications/monitoring systems.

Allow this program to be further advanced and support dynamic lighting, particle effects, etc. Sky’s the limit, the desktop is now a physics toy. You will drive the sales of touch screen devices, the manufacturers will be *blanking* your *blanks* in gratitude (I have no idea what corporations do for each other? Sending their flowers?).

Think of the commercials. It will be glorious. “Yeah. Mac – OS it’s pretty. It’s shiny. But can it do this?” *high speed montage of icons flying, blowing up when they hit the recycle bin in a shower of sparks, etc etc* (Get some music by Air or Kraftwerk) “I’m a PC” *cut to a shot of mac boy crying in the shower trying to scrub himself clean.*

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.

I never liked Enemy Territory’s assertions as well as those of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and it’s clear that the former is the object of reverence here, pausing to interject a bit of player economy a la Counter-Strike. We played RTCW until the sight of the the menu screen provoked uncontrollable bouts of vomiting, and still managed to tuck in a round or two between convulsions. It’s entirely possible that I’ve reached some kind of lifetime Wolfenstein quota.

Most gamers my age cut their teeth (and then vomited uncontrollably from the motion sickness) on Wolfenstein 3D. The original. The Pre-Doom ages. I was 14, and it was already old then but I got it for my Mac and played until I was cross-eyed. Thankfully modern-day truly 3 dimensional shooter games have figured out how to not make people vomit from just the game mechanics (it’s possible the fact that my computer could only render it in postage-stamp size had something to do with it) – the smooth motion of the game, so utterly unlike anything in human experience just set laser beams abounce in my inner ear. I don’t think I was even able to finish the game.

Fast forward 16 years: not gonna play the new Wolf. Why? Same reason I didn’t play Doom3 more than the first level. They’re BO-ring. Trying to figure out the stupid puzzles implemented by game designers (seriously, how many versions of pull that lever or find that key to continue are there going to be?) and the monotonous enemy combat (fuck up, reload, try a different tactic, rinse and repeat until you pass with enough health and ammo to be sure you can pass the next challenge) just doesn’t do it for me.

Team Fortress 2? Now, when I play that, I get to actually figuratively piss in someone’s cheerios every time I send a rocket flying up their ass after bouncing them into the air with my first rocket. See, you can’t piss off a computer (at least not yet) so what’s the point of trying to subjugate “AI” enemies? All they do is cheat, because there’s no other way to beat a human, or just use overwhelmingly massive force against you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my rockets have a date with a team full of noobs.

CS: You’ll see something very different by then. Let me explain. One prediction that I have PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, did something very unwise earlier this year. Never mind demanding that everybody start referring to fish as “Sea Kittens” – that’s just an irrelevant publicity stunt. No, they went and offered a million dollars to the first inventor who could demonstrate a vat machine for basically delivering vat grown meat. And I don’t think they realize how close we are to this and which industry will develop this machine first because it just so happens that an awful lot of people in the biotech sector are working very hard to deliver machines that will generate bits of meat to order. Specifically, Long Pork. For the organ transplant business. One of the scenes in the next novel I’m working on set in about 15 years time will involve the ladies of leisure in Morningside a fairly posh part of Edinburgh who lunch together – they dine out on each other. From the point of view of a very, very disturbed police officer who’s trying to figure out what, if anything, to charge them with.

I’m pretty sure most of my readers will know instantly what ‘Long Pork’ is. And he’s right. We are working, feverishly, to vat-grow human body parts – for a noble reason, to be sure, but this technology is going to be easy enough fairly soon. It shouldn’t be hard to grow any muscle, once the basic technology is worked out and the process is robotized/factorized.

I mean, one company can even print blood vessels already. No imagine a steak printer in the kitchen. It is possible, it’s just a question of how badly we want this technology.

And once you have that steak printer – the perfect steak, every time? From an empty fridge to prize-winning Kobe beef at the push of a button?

The logistics and price will undoubtedly keep such technology literally out of your kitchen for a long time, but once the basics for growing organ and muscle tissue are down, skies the limit.

We’re going to need it if we want to colonize space (unless we choose robotization, then we’ll simulate printing beef in our simulated kitchens to comfort ourselves with the memories as we travel – I mean, what else are robots gonna do for MMORPGs in space, fly space ships?), and we want to colonize space. And we need to do that, to survive. One planet is finite, but life need not be.

You know that teraflops video card a few of us own? Basically the supercomputer of a few years back, on a board, animating your little army games so you can shoot your friends. 6 years from now, Nvidia’s Chief Scientist predicts we’ll have about 20 teraflops on the top end video card.

And these predictions are pretty easy because technology so far doesn’t fail to disappoint in it’s increases. He may be off by about 6 months, but that’s it, barring a dissolution of the global societal order.

Dylan McGrath and the EE Times did the heavy lifting on this article, I’ll let you click through and appreciate their hard work on it’s own terms.