I’m really interested to see how CNN’s The Moment project will generate. “The Moment” will use a technology called PhotoSynth to generate a virtual 3D ‘photo’ of the venue of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, generated from the photos that people take there that day. It’s a cool technology, and I hope lots of people send in their photos so it will be rich with content. Check out PhotoSynth here (Windows only unfortunately)
The SOE’s combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.
The World’s First Wave Farm Goes Live in Portugal. Inhabitat has a post about the wave farm that uses the undulating motion of waves to shove hydraulic rams and generate power. It all seems very “We are now in the future” . (But maybe it’s just the fact they numbered the wave energy converters with big yellow numbers in a retro sci-fi chunky typeface.) Still, pretty awesome.
Sticky tape generates X-rays from Nature. The act of peeling tape off the roll in a vacuum has been shows to emit xrays. Sufficient to take an xray of a researcher’s finger. Pretty bizarre phenomenon for a mundane item.
Time Warp is a new show on the Discovery Channel that I’m excited to check out. It’s a simple premise - lots of slow motion footage, presumably backed by scientific nerdiness. Go slo-mo!
Metallics fans have been complaining that the new album Death Magnetic is so over compressed that there is some serious distortion in the audio quality. Interestingly, Gizmodo has posted about an audio engineer who claims that the Guitar Hero version of the song actually sounds much better since they used a mastering of the track without the compression. So of course, there are fans out there hacking GH audio data to recreate a better version.
Clive Thompson posts about a 10ft spinning magnetic sphere University of Maryland scientists built to study the prospect of the Earth’s poles flipping.
I’ve been on Twitter for a while, but never really embraced the whole concept. Recently read an article by Clive Thompson that has inspired me to give Twitter, Facebook etc another try. With iPhone apps such as Loopt and Twitterific, the micro-publishing medium becomes much more manageable. At the very least I’ll stay connected! Next step is to integrate all these services where possible.
Wayne Hale of NASA posts an interesting article to his blog about shutting down the shuttle and the logistical nightmare of keeping this old technology going.
Move over Large Hadron Collider - Japan’s Large Helical Device is in the house! Check out this wonderful photo. I think any experiment as big as a building is rad - but if it happens to be a beautiful helical design that creates mini-stars on earth, then bonus! (Don’t worry LHC, we still <3 you)
The Large Helical Device (LHD) project involves construction of the world’s largest superconducting helical device, which employs a heliotron magnetic field originally developed in Japan. The objectives are to conduct fusion-plasma confinement research in a steady-state machine and to elucidate important research issues in physics and engineering for helical plasma reactors.
There is a great Gizmodo interview with Alton Brown about the Food Network host’s latest road show Feasting on Waves, and the gadgetry that is involved in making hte show. Interesting read! Loved Feasting on Asphalt.
Info from TOKYOMANGO that the UNIQLO NY store will soon have humanoidish robots to help people shop! I’m sure this actually means ONE robot and it is probably supervised - but this is still super rad! I’m gonna go back to NY to check it out.
