Flyfire
MIT’s hypothetical 3D display composed of LED-fitted remote control helicopters.
Mechanical fireflies could help create a new kind of 3-D display, say researchers at MIT.
Standing in for the bioluminescent beetles will be LED-fitted, remotely controlled micro-helicopters that can be choreographed electronically to display shapes and images as they hover in midair. The project, called Flyfire, would use RC helicopters similar to the toys sold at the mall today.
Chatroulette, Texas
Other hotbeds of connectivity can be espied here.
So. You want to go for it, do you?
No good will come of cloning Neanderthals.
cloning neanderthals
Hawks believes the barriers to Neanderthal cloning will come down. “We are going to bring back the mammoth…the impetus against doing Neanderthal because it is too weird is going to go away.” He doesn’t think creating a Neanderthal clone is ethical science, but points out that there are always people who are willing to overlook the ethics. “In the end,” Hawks says, “we are going to have a cloned Neanderthal, I’m just sure of it.”
I love the future.
(via marginal revolution)
it’s all over now, baby blue
This feels transformational: Imagine the Paul Bunyan story calibrated to human creativity. Now imagine a programmer has come up with an algorithm that creates beautiful, organic music, stuff that would have taken years to compose, effortlessly.
Cope thinks the old cliché of beauty in the eye of the beholder explains the situation well: “The dots and lines on paper are merely triggers that set things off in our mind, do all the wonderful things that give us excitement and love of the music, and we falsely believe that somewhere in that music is the thing we’re feeling,” he says. “I don’t know what the hell ’soul’ is. I don’t know that we have any of it. I’m looking to get off on life. And music gets me off a lot of the time. I really, really, really am moved by it. I don’t care who wrote it.”
Good luck on that novel.
(via kottke)
ready-to-hand
“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”
iKey
Apple has filed a patent that would allow the iPhone to act as a universal remote for locked doors.
The device can communicate with an external device to open a lock. By way of example, the electronic device may be a model of an iPhone.
The external device may be any suitable electronic device such as a portable media player, personal data assistant or electronic lock that may be used to access a door, car, house or other physical area.
‘Google Underground’
Just last month, the Pentagon’s risk-taking research arm, DARPA, announced plans for a program called ‘Transparent Earth’. They’re spending $4 million this year on preliminary plans for a digital, 3D map that would display “the physical, chemical and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 kilometer depth.”
dear clusterflock
3D.
renrou sousuo yinqing
Do you remember the kitten-killer video where a Chinese woman in high heels stomped a kitten to death?
Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.
it’s a date
Starting March 12, you can pre-order the Wi-Fi model iPads. Available April 3rd.
Harvard Book Store gets Espresso Book Machine
What forward-thinking authors and publishers are after is a means of leveraging the “long tail” principle, which holds that declining distribution and inventory costs have made it possible to profit by selling tiny quantities of many different products rather than—as was formerly the rule—immense quantities of only a few products. By bridging the still-pronounced divide between electronic and “tangible” publishing, advances like the Espresso Book Machine could represent the realization of this model in the familiar space of the bookstore. “Even with conservative assumptions about demand, we will profit from this service,” Heather Gain, marketing manager of the Harvard Book Store, told Bookselling This Week.
See Poets & Writers article here. Heads up, Andrew–although you have probably already seen this article.
Matteo Cibic’s Hi-Fido
Matteo Cibic’s Hi-Fido is a ceramic speaker in the shape of a dog.
Compressed sensing
An algorithm that resolves high resolution images from next to nothing.
Compressed sensing was discovered by chance. In February 2004, Emmanuel Candès was messing around on his computer, looking at an image called the Shepp-Logan Phantom. The image — a standard picture used by computer scientists and engineers to test imaging algorithms — resembles a Close Encounters alien doing a quizzical eyebrow lift. Candès, then a professor at Caltech, now at Stanford, was experimenting with a badly corrupted version of the phantom meant to simulate the noisy, fuzzy images you get when an MRI isn’t given enough time to complete a scan. Candès thought a mathematical technique called l1 minimization might help clean up the streaks a bit. He pressed a key and the algorithm went to work.
Gruber at Macworld
one pad to rule them all
Alan Kay, a designer at the legendary 1970s Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, on the iPad:
When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
this is us
Twenty years ago the Voyager 1 space craft beamed back a photograph of our tiny planet.
Carl Sagan on the pale blue dot:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Amy said
You’re a douche bag if you watch YouTube on a horse.
the rare earth crisis of 2009
China is the only country capable at the moment of mining and processing the rare earth elements used in dozens of emerging technologies. With China’s increase in consumption, however, manufacturers around the world are concerned China may limit or halt the export of such materials.
Europium: This extremely rare but critical chemical makes the red color for television monitors and energy-efficient LED light bulbs. China is the only country today that produces europium, dysprosium and terbium, which are necessary for either boosting the efficient operating temperature of magnets or for producing red in color displays. In December, USGS scientists discovered Alaskan deposits of europium, but even the few U.S. companies that mine rare earth elements must send the resources to China for processing.
Lanthanum: A primary component of the nickel-metal hydride battery in Toyota’s popular hybrid car, Prius. The Prius also incorporates neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium. Lifton estimates that Toyota may use as much as 7,500 tons of lanthanum and 1,000 tons of neodymium per year to build its Prius cars. That dependence on rare earth elements has prompted the company to search for alternative sources outside China.
Neodymium: This represents a main component of the permanent magnets at the heart of the most efficient wind turbines. China’s own wind production efforts could consume all the available neodymium production and leave nothing for the rest of the world’s booming wind industry, Lifton notes in a recent report titled “The Rare Earth Crisis of 2009.” Neodymium is also used in the glass of incandescent light bulbs produced by General Electric, which has unsurprisingly invested in both Chinese and alternative sources of rare earth elements.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
quote out of context
“I don’t see,” Gruber concludes, “how Apple can get from where they are to where they need to be when they are negotiating with people that stupid.”
Thrashing around somewhere in a swamp of its own legislation
Mark Thomas takes on the Digital Economy Bill.
via @glinner
“This is very strange to me.”
Bill Gates’ email to Microsoft employees after Apple launched iTunes.
However I think we need some plan to prove that even though Jobs has us a bit flat footed again we move quick and both match and do stuff better.
legislating the apocalypse
The Virginia House of Delegates has voted against implantation of microchips against a person’s will, both as a measure of protecting personal privacy and to forestall the coming of the Anti-Christ.
“My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”