“902 surviving letters by Vincent van Gogh are to be published for the first time this week. Mostly written to the artist’s brother Theo, the letters offer personal insights which give lie to the idea that van Gogh was a “reckless and unreflective genius”.”
I was just checking the latest ASIMO news when I came across U3-X, Honda’s new personal mobility device. Neat little device that you can comfortably sit on and move around, with adjustable speed and easy navigation through body gestures. Looks pretty kool to me!
I’ll be collecting more information here, as I find it…
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 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……..
“We have put together a video of our Milestone 2 run, which we completed this past Monday, June 1, 2009. This particular run had our PR2 alpha robot navigate through eight doors, and plug its power cord into nine outlets. In this video, you can see the various challenges our robot faced, such as a crowded office environment and the abrupt appearance of a human obstacle. We nearly sabotaged the run early on. Folks around the office were eager to track the progress of the robot, so many people ran their own monitoring programs on the PR2. This caused an increase in CPU load, starving the navigation software. Nonetheless, the robot was able to continue with the run, albeit more slowly and cautiously.”
“We are currently developing algorithms that will narrow the learning gap between humans and machines, and enable flight systems to ‘learn’ the way humans do: through practice.
Rather than being programmed with detailed instructions, these flight systems will learn from experience. Like baby birds leaving the nest, they will be clumsy at first. Over time, however, they will become capable of sophisticated, coordinated maneuvers……”
So finally Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine, Wolfram Alpha, has been launched for public testing. Admittedly I had been waiting rather impatiently to try it, and now I’ve played with it quite a bit. Well, for now it can only compute answers to rather obvious and simple questions. I only hope that in time it’ll improve, since even though the ideas behind the engine are VERY intriguing [read this article by Nova Spivak for more info!], but well, it would just not be so useful if you could only ask it the size of the population of different countries.
And below is an interesting video of Wolfram Alpha going live. Posted to my twine by xo. Check it out!
On a bit of a different note, in case anyone here didn’t see this yet, make sure to watch Wolfram’s lecture on “A New Kind Of Science”. Currently reading the book… it’s quite amazing.
So on Sunday I was out with my mom for the Mother’s Day, and guess what we did. We went and watched the new Star Trek movie! =) I know, probably not the most typical Mother’s Day activity. 😉 But you have to keep in mind that it’s my mom we’re talking about here, and she’s as big a sci-fi fan as myself. So for us, a new Star Trek movie is considered a major major event! =)
Honestly at first I was worried about getting disappointed. I’ve always been such a huge fan of Star Trek, but the last TV series with Archer didn’t really catch my attention that much. [I have to admit though, the series got much better in the latter seasons, and the very last episode was a master piece.] Also, I have always been a much bigger fan of TNG characters than the original series….. so, altogether I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Well, it turned out that the movie is in fact AWESOME, MARVELOUS, FANTASTIC and I could go on like this forever. =) I can’t put in words how much I enjoyed this movie! I can’t say much since I don’t want to give way spoilers, but I lets just say that this isn’t like any normal prequel. 😉 You think you know what has happened and what will happen? Well, think again. Also, I love the fact that this movie has re-built the main characters of the original series so that on one hand the signature characteristics aren’t lost, and on the other hand there’s much more koolness to them now than there ever was before. The movie has an awesome plot, awesome characters, awesome visuals and basically awesome everything.
And…. uhmmmm……. Spock and Uhura?? How exactly did that happen??? Well that’s certainly cute! =D
Picture of me at the “event”. 😉 Click for higher res.
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. =)
