You Are (barely) Alive!

The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami certainly has a rainbow coloured imagination, but who knew he had feelings too? The ironic, desperate kind, the frustration-of-being kind. Not to mention the subversion of advertising within the confined framework of a commercial. It is usually that longing is fulfilled within these contexts, that desire can be overcome and its goal reached. Not here. But more importantly, outside of the localized capitalist motif, these commercials give us a unique insight into how an artificial creature, bestowed with the same neuro-curcuitry and consciousness as us, would be stuck living a life of longing and resentment. The brain is only half the battle.
(via Kitsune Noir)

The Reality of the Virtual

Brain-Computer Interface for Second Life


"A research team at the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. An EEG machine reads motor cortex data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move."
(more via Pink Tentacle)


"Virtual Reality is a rather miserable idea. A much more interesting notion is the opposite. Not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual. That is to say reality, real effects produced by something that does not yet fully exist." Slavoj Žižek - The Reality of the Virtual

Robot Controlled by Monkey Across the Sea

"A humanoid robot moves its legs at a laboratory in Japan as directed by the brain waves of a small monkey located in the United States." - Discovery News (thanks Heather!)

How They Work

A fascinating tally of rituals, habits, and ruminations on aspects of the creative process specific to well known creators. The list is long and includes writers (Philip Pullman - who used to write in a shed, Don Dellilo - who writes a paragraph a page), researchers in robotics and psychology, musicians (Brian Eno, Autechre), actors (Bill Murray, Nick Nolte)..... and more and more.

rodcorp: How we work
(via kottke.org)

Start-Up Sells Solar Panels at Lower-Than-Usual Cost

Keep an eye on these guys, coming soon to an IPO near you ;)

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google’s co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing.

"A single seraphic word. You can examine the word with a click, tracing its origins, development, earliest known use, its passage between languages, and you can summon the word in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Arabic, in a thousand languages and dialects living and dead, and locate literary citations, and follow the word through the tunnelled underworld of its ancestral roots ...

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggy-back races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the Glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in your room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measure of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardour of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive -- a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills. Peace." -Don DeLillo, Underworld

The Urban Peasant Passes On

CBC Radio just reported that James Barber has died. This is sad news for anyone who grew up watching his wonderful, laid back style of cooking that espoused using no measuring utensils, and whatever you could find in the bottom of the fridge. CBC reports that at the time of his death he was sitting at his kitchen table with a pot of soup on the stove.

Rare Mummified Dinosaur Unearthed: Contains Skin, and Maybe Organs, Muscle

"To say we are excited would be an understatement," said Phil Manning, a paleontologist at England's University of Manchester who is leading the examination. "When I first saw it in the field, (I thought) 'Shiiiit, that's a really well preserved dinosaur..."

ACT-R

Act-R is a complicated and fascinating thoery of human cognition. The Carnegie Mellon University website has a series of tutorials on the subject as well as an excellent overview of the theory.

"ACT-R is a cognitive architecture: a theory about how human cognition works. On the exterior, ACT-R looks like a programming language; however, its constructs reflect assumptions about human cognition. These assumptions are based on numerous facts derived from psychology experiments."

Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot

2 of Every Kind

The scientific truth behind the flood myth.

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything by Garrett Lisi

Surfer dude (with a ton of degrees) stuns physicists with geometrical theory of everything

Bigger Than The Sun

No longer is the Sun the biggest object in the Solar System.

Before the Big Bang

"The Big Bang theory of the origin of our universe is widely accepted by the physics community. The idea that our universe started out as some infinitesimally small point, which expanded out to what we see today, makes a lot of sense. Except for one small thing. That initial point, called a singularity by physicists, is a physical impossibility. According to the models we have today, the temperature of the universe at that first moment would have had to be infinite, which mathematically makes no sense. Also, the singularity doesn't do a good job of explaining where all the matter and energy we see today in the universe came from. So, physicists are increasingly starting to look at other branches of physics to see what they can do to replace the singularity with a more reasonable proposition, one which can actually be explained by existing science." (CBC Radio)