The Cern Hadron Collider is Coming!

Radiohead As Played by 1980s Tech

Via Geekologie...

Not actually recognizable until about 1:10 in (wait for it to load and skip to it), but absolutely mindblowing from there:

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

A DIY Drumming Robot!

From Let's Make Robots!

String Theory Explained in a Hilarious Accent

Shockwave Traffic

It turns out that traffic is not just caused by that lady on her cell phone... but I will continue to think so anyway. Life is better when there is someone to blame.

Adobe Photo Lens

Ever been so tipsy that you have to cover one eye to see straight? I think this lens is based on the same principle.

John Koza's Invention Machine

"What Koza has done is to automate the creative process. To begin, the invention machine randomly generates 75,000 prescriptions. It then analyzes them in KOJAC, which assigns each a fitness rating based on how close it comes to a desired set of specifications-in this case, a wide field of view with minimal distortion. None of the 75,000 members of the first generation will be usable wide-field telescopic eyepieces. But a few of these primitive systems will be marginally effective at focusing a wide field of view, and a couple others might slightly reduce distotrtion in one way or another.

From there, it´s Darwinism 101. The invention machine mates some systems together, redistributing characteristics from two parent lens systems into their offspring. Others it mutates, randomly altering a single detail. Other lenses pass on to the next generation unchanged. And then there are the cruel necessities of natural selection: The machine expels most lenses with low fitness ratings from the population, kills them off so their genetic material won´t contaminate the others."

Continue Reading...

XO Laptop

Wired: Hair Apparent

"Today, surgeons are able to harvest and reimplant as few as two hairs at a time, making the transplants look more natural. Still, the supply-and-demand problem remains. In the early 1990s, Colin Jahoda, a researcher at the University of Durham in England, took a step toward solving it. He stripped a few cells off the root of a mouse's whisker follicle and implanted them into its ear. Out grew a whisker. Next he took a section of follicle cells from his own head and implanted it between the fine, pale hair on his wife's arm. A thick, dark hair emerged, complete with male DNA. This demonstrated that the cells at the base of a follicle can and do regenerate into self-contained, preprogrammed hair factories."

Continue Reading...

Johnny Lee, Will You Marry Me?

Joli and I just bought a Wii, and we have been playing the games nearly every night, marveling at the function of the machine. In tennis, if you tilt your wrist inward on a return shot, you hit cross-court, something that has recently amazed me in its accuracy. (Sadly, I am unable to do such things in real life.) Yet I haven't spent much time wondering what's inside the thing. To me, it has just been a magical white box that allows me and Joli to go bowling in our living room.

But Johnny Chung Lee, a PhD-seeking graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University has already hacked the device to use in other applications, such as an interactive white board and a head-tracking display device, which makes a 3D display possible (videos of both projects are posted below).

It's guys like this who make computer science seem like punk rock.

Head-Tracking VR:


Interactive Whiteboard

Animal-Inspired Robots!

DIY Robot!