Scientists from the past, predicting the future. Always good for a laugh when you are living in their future.
Monthly Archive for September, 2004
I knew it was possible. Some 3D Buffs have used a sophisticated 3d printer and their impressive ability to visualise in 3d to create actual objects of Escher's drawings. They also show how they did it…
Obviously they are rather dependent on the orientation of the object in relation to the viewer, but still very impressive…
This article entitled What the Bubble Got Right is an interesting look at some of the things which corporations has learnt from the Internet Boom/Bust. Including that young people, although inexperienced at the details can send a company in new and far more creative directions.
I wonder how much influence the speech writers actually have on Bush, this artiicle from CBS details the 10 most obvious times Bush has said one thing, then said the opposite later.
I suppose the classic has to be:
"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories."(May 29, 2003)
"I recognize we didn't find the stockpiles of weapons we all thought were there." (Sept. 9, 2004)
The page in a unique show of non-partisanship also has a link to Kerry's top 10 too.
A fascinating presentation about true P2P static gathering from an ISP. The statistics they have amassed are very interesting, especially the ones detailing which methods of p2p are most popular around the world…uk is the largest user of kazaa, asia are dominated by bittorrent and central Europeans are fans of eDonkey.
The presentation is ultimately trying to sell the idea of something which i find particularly scary, which is called deep-packet inspection which looks at the packets which are being sent and received in the 'last mile' of internet communication. This system will potentially allow ISPs to see who is using P2P systems and what they are getting. Blueyonder has already expressed an interest in this to 'enhance future products' i.e. charge more…
Seems that Mt. St.Helens in Washington is getting ready to erupt again. According to the people who watch it, the dome is saturated with lava and earthquakes (only light ones at the moment) are happening 3-4 times per minute.
There is a webcam of the mountain, if it erupts this could be quite an internet event.
engadget has a great how-to article about how to upgrade your organic dog which included methods of communicating with your dog through (essentially) emotions with accompanying sounds also being able to phone your dog and one of the most interesting upgrades which is to put a tiny digicam on the dog coller for a dogs eye view of the world.
I have to say, I don’t have a emotion reading device for the dog pictured, but it does seem to have a certain look of irritance about the whole thing.
thanks to Sam for this link…
Either a very nice coincidence, or there really is something to this religion thing.
It seems that the paths of the bout of Florida targeted hurricanes seem to run amazingly close to the districts of Florida which 'voted' the Republicans into office in the election of 2000 in America.
Could this be a sign of a Democratic God? A sign that the arabic promise of intervention by Allah is true? or a sign that Buddha is just letting people know about karma?
It does seem however that hurricane Jeanne is a little less descriminate…it could still be argued though.
Just in case anyone is missing Brunel University for whatever reason, I must remind you of what it is like.
To coincide with the start of a new year and a campus population increase of over 2000 students. They decided it would be a great idea to pot plants around the new (building site) library extension…using manure.
So now the whole of campus smells of shit! Good plan…
The very pretty Astin-Martin DB9 has a unique selling point, it contains the worlds first neural network to control engine combustion and prevent misfiring. It learns as the car matures, what is normal and what isnt and learns how to control it by shutting down apropriate cylinders at apropriate times.
Isn’t it good to know that when you are next flying over California, that everyone of the planes in the airspace around, above and below you are getting their information from off-the-shelf pc's running windows 2000 advanced server.
Amazingly enough they switched from a stable unix system to one which has to be rebooted every 30 days due to memory leaks in the poorly written software.
Even more scary than this is that 'because of inexperienced trainee staff' the system got to its 49.7 day cutoff and crashed, leaving 800 planes flying around trying to avoid each other.
Is a competition to photoshop the best post apocalypse scene of a modern city. Some nice ones in here, worth a look.
Adobe is going to introduce a new photographic image format aimed at high-end digital photographers. It is called DNG, Digital NeGative (I guess the marketing dept thought DNF was a little close to what my cross-country race results used to say).
It is an image format which holds the full quality of the image the camera produces, rather than running a compression algorithm (such as JPEG) on it first. This is an attempt to standardise the existing situation where each camera maker has their own proprietary format.
Physicists at Imperial College have developed a type of media storage system which can hold up to a Terrabyte on a disc no bigger than a CD or DVD. They call it MODS, an abbreviation for Multiplexed Optical Data Storage.
They comment that the disc could hold every episode of The Simpsons, this is less impressive to those who know that every episode (compressed) takes up just under 30Gb, but still…it is a good sales phrase.
A fantastic photomosaic of G dubya, created entirely out of photos of soldiers killed in Iraq. Deeply disturbing…