Well well, it appears Honda’s ASIMO has a serious competitor! While ASIMO’s fastest running speed has been 6km/h so far, this new Toyota humanoid is running at 7km/h. Also as seen in this video, this robot can do a nice job re-balancing itself when pushed slightly. This new Toyota robot’s stunningly natural running really amazes me. however, while standing, the legs look all things but natural. 😉 Which is why I still like ASIMO better. =)
ASD’s new gorgeous and painful demo called Chameleon was just released on Evoke, and it RUUUUUUUULEZ. =D And I really do mean painful. You have to watch it to know why….. You can download it from here, and read the lyrics here. Make sure you pay close attention to the music and the lyrics while enjoying the outstanding visuals. Aside from the fact that aMUSiC has done it again with an awesome tune [very 007 in my opinion this time around! ;)], the lyrics are just… priceless! 😉 They add a lot to the general direction and the message of the demo. I have to say this again… I luuuuvvv the visual style of ASD’s latest 3 demos! =)
The video capture is not there yet but I will post it as soon as there is one.
This article on IEEE spectrum is pretty awesome… check it out!
“Researchers at the University of Michigan have found a way to control the movement of tiny droplets of fluid in a microelectromechanical (MEMS) device—with sound. The scientists use several musical tones to move droplets along different channels on a chip. By combining tones or applying them at appropriate times, they can move liquids along multiple channels and even mix, split, and sort the liquids.
The advance, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, holds promise for making microfluidic devices compact and simple. Microfluidic devices are glass or plastic chips with etched channels through which you can maneuver nano- or even picoliters of liquids. Thousands of chemical or biological reactions can be performed on the chips simultaneously, promising to speed up medical diagnostics, chemical synthesis, and drug discovery.”
An article I just came across on ReadWriteWeb… very very interesting!
“The proliferation of real-time search engines and trend monitors (sometimes referred to as “listening platforms”) has thus far done little to address problems of this scale and importance. This is because they fail to provide context — i.e. show how a new piece of information is relevant to what we’ve seen before and where it fits in the space of possibilities and relationships. For instance, if you are a programming director at CNN trying to discriminate between significant news and Internet memes, simply knowing that #iranelection is a trending topic doesn’t tell you its relation to other topics or which communities are driving it — both critical factors. One promising area is data-oriented user interfaces: data and algorithmic analysis in the back-end and direct visualization and navigation in the front-end. This the next stage of social information, slicing and dicing, mixing and matching, interpreting and analyzing, completely on demand. In this new landscape, the data is the interface. It’s not just about sitting back and looking at pretty pictures. It is about setting aside stale UI metaphors and getting as bare-to-the-bone a human interface as possible for computation. The recently launched Wolfram-Alpha applies this principle to structured data. (Disclosure: I was a member of the core Wolfram-Alpha team and may continue to consult with Wolfram Research.) Real-time data streaming offers similar possibilities and opportunities. In this vein, let’s outline some basic ideas and methods for giving context to the streams.”
“I – In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria, dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’asemplare in questo libello; e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia.”
Oh I just love this……From La Vita Nuova by Dante. English translation here.
I just finished reading “The Magician” by Somerset Maugham. Yes I’ve been on a bit of a Maugham marathon lately, I truly enjoy his works. I had never read “The Magician” before, and I’m glad I finally got the chance. In addiction to the usual genius of his style and the philosophical dilemmas, there’s a ton of sci-fi and a good deal of horror in this one! =)
One thing that didn’t surprise and yet fascinated me was the way Maugham builds the character of Oliver Haddo. He has this true genius for bringing to life the most horrifying, grotesque and complex characters. “Charles Strickland” in the “Moon and Sixpence” is another great example, in fact I can’t help noticing certain similarities between Haddo and Strickland. Maugham seems to have had a personal fascination with creating these monstrous characters, through which he can make his points regarding the complexities of human nature, much better and much sharper than he ever could, through pictures of niceness and nobility.
Maugham has very often based the main characters of his books upon a real world person. Charles Strickland was based on Paul Gauguin as I wrote in a pervious post, and apparently Oliver Haddo was based on Aliester Crowley. So, Maugham takes some of the most outstanding characteristics of an already magnificent [in either a positive or a negative way!] personality, and then ads his own special ingredients to create the main characters of his books. The heavy contrast caused by the moral and behavioral difference between various characters in the story, magnifies the personality traits of each of them further.
Of course in Case of Oliver Haddo, given the bizzare personality of Aleister Crowley, the end result is quite the perfect source of horror……..
Hey, I'm Aasemoon, and this is my blog which has been around since 1998. Childhood toy project that ended up growing up with me.
You can reach me here:
aasemoon.blue
Zorbas is my kitten. You can see some pictures of him below. =)
