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A tiny, guest-edited blog!

Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.


Best disaster-averting title for a technical paper

The paper is called A Critical Analysis of IGBT Geometries, With the Intention of Mitigating Undesirable Destruction Caused by Fault Scenarios of an Adverse Nature presented by Greg Leyh at the Particle Accelerator Conference held in Oregon last week.


A gratuitous example of a high voltage fault resulting in a transformer explosion

Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 11:59:29 AM | permalink


The dullest blog in the world

Here it is (but apparently they hadn't heard of this guest bar). It's part of Wibsite dedicated to creativity+faith+community. They worry that the dullest blog in the world has been linked to by hundreds this week that it may be in danger of becoming too interesting.

Link Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 11:29:28 AM | permalink


Talking Butt (to put it mildly)

Talking heads are all the rage that I thought it fair to also make a talking butt. Not work safe but click here if you want to either laugh or vomit. This uses technology from Pulse3D called Veepers which allows you to take any 2D image and some text which it will read in and convert to synchronized speech and mouth animation. It even randomizes eye blinks and head moving.

Link (not work safe)   Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 1:38:03 AM | permalink


Smart Fabrics

Here are a few examples of interesting developments in textiles:

Infineon has a smart carpet that is really a self-organizing network of chips woven into fabric where each 'tile' is a sensor/processor networked via conductive threads. These could be used as motion or fire detectors as they monitor temperature, pressure, vibration, and motion.

Luminescent fiber from Luminex:
,

Elektex which is a 1mm thick fabric that can sense on 3 axes (x,y,z) and can send back positioning (x,y from stroking the fabric), and pressure (z) data.

And Electric Plaid from International Fashion Machines which makes a programmable, color changing textile.

Link Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 1:05:29 AM | permalink


Memory Prostheses

Caveat: All the silly conjecture on possible applications are my own and not of the legitimate researchers mentioned here:

In 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote an essay As We May Think which called for scientists to expand a person's mental capabilities through technology. He proposed the Memex: a personal machine to record and share a person's experience. With storage getting progressively cheaper, and cameras and recorders getting more portable, this can be implemented a little more conveniently.

Microsoft BARC has the MyLifeBits project which aims to put all personal documents and media online. For the last few years researcher Gordon Bell has been capturing and storing his publications, mail (both snail and e), music, photos, presentations, home movies, and lectures. His collection to date amounts to a little under 30gb of which 12gb are on CDs. It uses SQLServer for querying and for annotating notes. There is also a tool to make a copy of every web page ever visited.

While MyLifeBits duplicates the functionality of Bush's Memex, PARC researcher Trevor Smith's open source Memex Simulator not only realizes the functionality, but also intends to implement a physical design described by Bush in a Time Magazine article, but using modern software and hardware instead of the analog mechanical devices conceived of in 1945.

How useful this would be for Alzeimer patients (as long as they remember how to recover what they've forgotten or at least the last n-minutes if they've forgotten what they've forgotten). Maybe the instructions and explanation of what a Memex is should be tattooed somewhere obvious. This all gets interesting when everyone's Memex's are networked and searchable (opening up whole cans of privacy/security worms).

What great fodder other's video captured lives could make for UCB's Marc Davis' TVLand (that I heard of at the 030303>Collective Play colloquium), which allows audiences traditionally media consumers to become media producers. TVLand is comprised of a metadata framework for classifying and annotating media assets and the means for capturing and re-editing of this content selected by a user based on their own criteria to create new content, which could get placed back in the pool of media assets.

The editing capability, vanity, and the revisionist nature of humans may make this less useful for the Alzeimers crowd though. Plunderphonics will seem like such an archaic baby step then.

Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 1:07:13 AM | permalink


Stelarc's Exoskeleton in Ljublana

Tomorrow May 14 2003 at 9pm, Stelarc will be showing his Exoskeleton in a warehouse 30 minutes from Ljublana. Organized by Cankarjev Dom, the largest cultural organization in Slovenia, it is part of a program featuring other Australian cultural activities, including installations, music and theatre. After the performance, it will be exhibited at the Goteborg Biennale in Sweden for 3 months.

More details on the Exoskeleton can be found here

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stelarc)

posted by karen marcelo at 6:03:43 PM | permalink


Indie HipHop

Just as Cervix is the female Linux distro1, Ice Cream Cone is the only white guy in independent hip hop. Using a turntable, a radio, 2 Macs, SoundEdit, and a pocket calculator, the CD "Die Drei Von Der Tankstelle" was created.

Making some of the strangest hip hop is K the I who uses Acid Pro and 'old people music' samples to make some ill beats. (check Track 6).

Most indy hiphop labels have their own message boards which are used to plan shows, form crews, and write music. Through the Distorted Megabytes board, Rev. Al (aka Ice Cream Cone) hooked up and produced tracks for Lumin and Oranur Effect. Def Jux (Cannibal Ox, Aesop Rock, etc.) and Sonic Sum are other examples of labels with huge boards. People freely posting their lyrics and beats online, the DIY nature of music production, logistics, and distribution highlight how much of a legacy system the tired mainstream side of things seems to be.

1urban legend (obscure attempt at sarcasm)
Discuss (Thanks, s0m3scr33nn4m3 + enjoyingbananas)

posted by karen marcelo at 12:28:42 AM | permalink


Augmented Reality Applications: Blogging and Graffiti

With location sensing devices getting cheaper and more available, projects that enable the annotation of physical spaces and the mapping of online sites geographically seem to be cropping up lately. Many cool projects exist relating to this like headmap, Blogmapper (which has a mapped graffiti blog), Joshua Schacter's GeoURL, and Websign used by Cooltown to hyperlink physical locations on the web. If I'm not mistaken, there is a patent out on mapping GPS coordinates to URLs. Be interesting to see where all this is heading and the network effects of it all.

Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 9:17:34 AM | permalink


Pooh Vibrator

A judge decides against Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne's granddaughter to reclaim the copyright to the classic children's books last Friday.

I wonder what they have to say about this:

According to Violet Blue, people should snap these up before the cease and desists start pouring in...

Link   Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 8:41:48 PM | permalink


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