20.2.08
3.2.08
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
27.1.08
Bank's billions burnt in 10 days
By Friday, January 18, Jérôme Kerviel, a junior suit in the banking world, was on the hook for €50 billion - the equivalent of about half of all the gold and currency reserves held by France. The sum also exceeded the entire value of the bank at which he worked...
19.1.08
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!)
15.1.08
18.12.07
16.12.07
It.. Is.. Baby!
A series of clever Fanta commercials from Japan featuring increasingly stranger grade-school teachers. With the world gone mad, disillusioned youth can always escape into a world of chemically colored sugary goodness.
9.12.07
"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
4.12.07
The New Shelton Wet/Dry: The Oil Massage With No Happy Ending
"After burning through $185 million in 18 months, Boo.com ended the way it started: intoxicated by a dot-com pipe dream. Its bankruptcy marked the end of the ultimate parable of the new economy run amok — a tale filled with larger-than-life ambition, loads of hype, luxury living, a penchant for partying and, yes, a seemingly unlimited expense account..."
1.12.07
It’s better because you don’t even have to roll down the windows
A new biker gang is roaming the streets of Queen's. Strapped to the bikes of urban youth are huge speaks which put out 5, 000 watts of sound to the neighbourhood.
More Photos/Video/Story (NY TIMES)
via the new shelton wet/dry
20.11.07
19.11.07
Mexican Island made of Recycled Floating Bottles
Mexican Island made of Recycled Floating Bottles (youtube)
17.11.07
F-35 Joint Striker Fighter helmet renders the plane nearly invisible
"This ain't your papa's flight helmet. Designed for pilots of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the helmet you see above will allow pilots to virtually see through the aircraft around them, giving them a wide field of view ahead and superimposing an Infared image of the world below onto their visors at night."
16.11.07
Children of the Cave
"Children attend class at the Dongzhong (literally meaning "in cave") primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts." (Reuters)
13.11.07
Bin Laden relative to get supersonic business jet
Saudi businessman Tarek bin Laden, half-brother of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, became the first customer to sign up for the $80 million Aerion supersonic business jet on Monday. (Reuters)
12.11.07
Poker Bots on the Rise
In the very near future, online poker may become a suckers’ game that humans won’t have a chance to win. Bots are quite scale-able and it will be virtually impossible to prohibit computer or computer-assisted online playing.
Poker sites are trying to assure customers that they will kick bots off their site and seize their assets. But unlike the statistical trail left by crude poker cheats at Absolute Poker, it is possible for bots to randomize their strategies and even hire individual humans to run them. (NY Times)
10.11.07
Walter Murch was on A&E this morning. Walter Murch is a mustache god. The mustache will heretofore be known as the Murch.
Now everytime I make a run (uh-huh, uh-huh)
Girl, you turn around and cry
I ask myself oh, why ohhh why... (uh-huh, uh-huh)
See you've got to understand
I can't work a nine to five
So I'll be gone... til Movember
1. You don’t talk about Movember outside of the month.
2. Movember runs for 30 days. No more.
3. There is to be no joining of the Mo to side burns – That’s a beard.
4. There is to be no joining of the handlebars – That’s a goatie.
5. A small complimentary growth under the bottom lip is allowed (aka a tickler).
6. You must remain clean shaven apart from your Mo for the entire 30 days.
9.11.07
Ben: The Last Supper. All 16 Billion glorious pixels of it.
Bobby is inventing a new game: Sub-Saharan Africa or Da Vinci painting?
"The history of the Last Supper is substantially the history of its restorations...This was primarily due to Leonardo's decision to use oils instead of the usual fresco technique"
We have a problem with history. It is clear: the next step will be to use the 16 billion pixels to self heal the representation of the painting. Our ethos is that the passage of time should be halted. Everything must be as it was when it was created regardless of its inherent properties. I want to see The Last Supper as it will appear 10,000 years from now. Perhaps only then will its full beauty be exposed.
I would like a Wingsuit, please.
Wingsuit flying is the art of flying the human body through the air using a special jumpsuit, called a wingsuit, that shapes the human body into an airfoil which can create lift.
