Wendy Carlos on HAL 9000
When I first experienced 2001 (in the huge Cinerama theater on Broadway), I guessed that the effect of HAL dying simply had to have been done on an Eltro machine, or a close copy of one. By absurd coincidence, I was an engineer in NYC who may have had the most experience with an original Mark II, at Herb Moss’s Gotham Recording Studios, now long gone.
Spotted this today and just had to share. Ain’t nothing but the geek in me.
(Via Coudal.)
Wordpress app for your iPhone
Now posts will come from everywhere
TechCrunch Web Tablet Project
Tech Crunch is looking for folks to help out creating and producing an open source web tablet. The idea is to create a light weight interface much like the iPhone with WiFi that simply runs Firefox. I hope this works because if it does then it would legitimize blogs and the open source community in way they haven’t been yet.
How to pwn the iPhone.
Lifehacker has a great how-to on the iPhone pwnage 2.0.1 tool for jailbreaking the new 3g. Jailbreaking, for those not in the know, allows for third party apps not approved by Apple to be used. It does not unlock the phone for other carriers.
smart parking in san francisco
San Francisco has outfitted 6,000 parking spots with wireless sensors that determine if a parking space is occupied.
Drivers can access SFPark’s up-to-date information via their cell phone, but to keep everyone safe on the road, the city also plans to install battery-operated street signs that display the number of empty spots available in nearby streets.
Apparently, these 4-inch-by- 4-inch plastic sensors not only determine when vehicles are parked, but also when they depart, and a when a new one replaces it, which has city officials thinking of ways drivers could feed the parking meter without returning to their car.
iPhone 2.0 software has been jailbroken
Go here to find out more.
clusterflock iPhone 3g giveaway update
We gave away two iPhones this year and Tony was kind enough to write up a little review.
The Exposure client is the best implementation of a front-end to Flickr that I’ve seen for a mobile device, and one if its coolest features is the use of the Core Location function of the iPhone to show you photos on Flickr that were taken nearby wherever you are. That’s neat on a 1st gen iPhone with only loosely triangulated location info, but add the 3G’s GPS in there, and you can get pretty precise. The first time I used the feature, I was in a neighborhood bar, and the first photo that popped up was taken right inside that same bar near where I was sitting. Neat.
Leonardo’s lost fresco, The Battle of Anghiari
Maurizio Seracini has been looking for Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari, a fresco presumed to be lost behind layers of other frescoes, and by some estimates, the most beautiful work of the Renaissance.
Until recently, art scholars were confident they knew the fate of da Vinci’s mural of war. The painting, so tradition says, had been botched by Leonardo’s own hand, abandoned in shame and then obliterated by an imperious Medici duke.
In 1977, however, Dr. Seracini, then a young apprentice to noted UCLA art scholar Carlo Pedretti, noticed a curious thing. He was inspecting the vast battle fresco by Giorgio Vasari that since 1563 has covered the long wall once occupied by da Vinci’s work. There, in the clash of armies depicted near the ceiling, he was startled to discover that Vasari had painted two words in white on a tiny green banner all but invisible to view from below: “cerca trova.”
Seek; you will find.
iPhone software
I updated the software on my iPhone yesterday to 2.0. So far, not much of a difference. Are there any apps people think are invaluable?
Also, did anyone get a new one?
Discovering Life on Mars: Bad News?
Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University thinks so:
Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: the first sign of extraterrestrial life ever detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we’re not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.
They shouldn’t. To the contrary, if we discovered traces of some simple extinct life form – a bacterium, some algae – it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something even more advanced, like the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be horrible news. The more complex the life we found, the more depressing. Scientifically interesting, yes, but dire news for the future of the human race.
Here’s the basic argument: There is a conspicuous silence “out there,” and this suggests that there is a “Great Filter” (Robin Hanson’s term and idea). This means that the filter may lie in our past (as a highly improbable step in the early development of life) or in our future (as a highly improbable leap needed for a civilization to populate the galaxy and survive extinction. Bostrom’s argument holds that finding evidence of even simple life on Mars would tend to place the GF in out future. And, as he also points out, there may be filters in our past and future.
I have to say that I would still be excited and pleased to hear that life–simple or complex–is or was present on Mars. If we decide to see everything in terms of our potential survival as a species, who needs the threat of a Filter to see our prospects as slim? In many ways I think we have the most to fear from our own egos–our sense of dominion over a galaxy we can’t even reach. News of other life elsewhere may itself be a step that leads to just the sort of curiosity we need to get through the next Great Filter.
Iran Launches Oil Barrels into Persian Gulf
Tehran, Iran — The global petroleum market threw up a little in its throat Thursday as Iran commenced a second consecutive day of test firing oil-filled surface-to-surface missiles.
Determined to prove its courage, fortitude, and earnest resistance to common sense, the radical Islamic republic launched an estimated five hundred fully laden medium- and short-range Shahab-3, Scud-C, and Hoot missiles into the Straits of Hormuz, gateway to 40% of the world’s fuel supply.
Best NES Mod Ever
For more go to Ben Heck Forums (via Gizmodo)
A-Space X, a Second Life for Spies
The Air Force Research Laboratory, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) are developing a Second Life for spies.
The project, dubbed “A-SpaceX,” is designed to create a host of “synthetic worlds” where intelligence analysts can not only share data with one another, but “also with themselves and their previous states of thought about a problem. Analysts will be able to explore their own past thinking about the data as well as enabling the proactive exploration of how that data might change in the future,” according to a military announcement.
Kenichi Horie’s Wave Powered Boat
A Japanese sailor has crossed the Pacific in a wave powered boat.
“When waves were weak, the boat slowed down. That’s the problem to be solved,” the adventurer told reporters Saturday from aboard his catamaran Suntory Mermaid II off the Kii Peninsula in western Japan.
The 9.5 metre (31-foot) boat is equipped with two special fins at the front which can move like a dolphin’s tail each time the vessel rises or falls with the rhythm of the waves.
iPhones for two
Okay, I put the list of people who entered the iPhone giveaway in a spreadsheet, in the order that they entered, and generated a random, non repeating list of numbers at random.org. Looks like Anthony Delgrosso and Ian Horner are this year’s recipients! Congratulations, guys, I’ll send you the funds shortly.
Anti-Terrorist Drill in Shangdong
(via autoblog)
BlackBerry to iPhone 3G: Is Now The Time To Pull the Trigger?
For anyone out there who is considering moving to the iPhone 3G from a BlackBerry (as I am), I have posted a lengthy consideration of making such a jump over at my employer’s blog. If you are considering such a move or have done it in the past, I SO would like your comments.
iPhone giveaway
It looks like I’ll be on planes all week next week so I’m going to hold the drawing for this year’s iPhone giveaway on Friday and announce the winners. Right now we’re at one and a half phones. I’ll make sure we get at least to two. Good luck!
IRS Spam Is Clever, Dangerous
I just had a pretty scary piece of spam show up in my inbox. It appears to be from the IRS, implicates my employer, and comes immediately on the heels of the US tax season. All in all, very well socially-engineered.
Long story short, it’s spam, but you need to be careful. There’s more where it came from.
More details here.
Delighting with Data
Tom Taylor discusses the fun of reprocessing data, making things, like the Tower Bridge in London, speak via twitter. Other examples include asteroids, the International Space Station:
You’re probably here because you’re a geek. That’s cool, so am I. And if you’re anything like me, you probably like data, and lots of it. I’m sure you know loads of fantastic examples of repurposing boring data for incredibly useful stuff.
But sometimes we geeks forget about all the delightful and beautiful things we can build. The things that aren’t necessarily useful or purposeful, but pointless, silly and wonderful. So, I’m talking about building beautiful things out of (sometimes) boring data sources. I’ll be talking less about design and visualisation, and more about projects and ‘things’.
The chembots are coming
Chembots are tiny robots made of chemicals that expand on command.
The chembots could get into a building through a crack, for example. They could explore a cave or crevice and dismantle an explosive. Or they might climb ropes, wires or trees. Another tiny idea: One chembot could pack a smaller chembot into a situation, then release it for even more minute explorations.
Mostly, I like typing chembots.
Chembots.
There, it’s meaningless.
AT&T to Sell iPhone Without Contract
Thus saith the NYT:
AT&T Inc. will sell the new version of the iPhone without a service contract for $400 more than the price with a two-year plan, a break from the rules set when Apple Inc.’s popular touch-screen gadget debuted last year.
Two new models of iPhones go on sale July 11 for $199 and $299, depending on the amount of memory, with two-year AT&T contracts. The no-contract versions will cost $599 and $699 and will be sold sometime ”in the future,” AT&T said.
facial recognition software for dating
A Seattle-based company is marketing facial recognition software for online dating sites.
According to Eyealike, it has added a new image search solution for facial recognition and similarity matching. The new feature is targeted at searching social networking and online dating websites, which helps people find potential mates using what the firm describes as “personal preferences for face shape, skin color, and hair color.”
iPhone costs per month
AT&T has released detailed pricing information for the 3g iPhone.
The Google Hypothesis
At what point do vast databases allow us to skip theory and move straight to predicted observations.
Instead Google operates a very large dataset of observations which show that for any given spelling of a word, x number of people say “yes” when asked if they meant to spell word “y.” Google’s spelling engine consists entirely of these datapoints, rather than any notion of what correct English spelling is. That is why the same system can correct spelling in any language.
&
If you can learn how to spell without knowing anything about the rules or grammar of spelling, and if you can learn how to translate languages without having any theory or concepts about grammar of the languages you are translating, then what else can you learn without having a theory?