Oh The Things You Can Do With A Wii-mote…
TED Talks: Murray Gell-Mann
This just got posted on the TED site… If you’ve ever heard this man speak, you know you’re in for a treat…
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Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and Truth In Physics
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Strengthen Your Mental Abilities
Cold meat and chocolate will get your mind fit … and sex is handy too, according to a new book.
Denis Campbell, health correspondent
The Observer, Sunday December 2 2007
Forget Sudoku, crossword puzzles and computer games. If you really want to train your brain, then eat dark chocolate, have plenty of sex and follow the Scandinavian example of having cold meat for breakfast.
The growing numbers of people who are trying to strengthen their mental ability through ‘brain training’ should also avoid cannabis, watching soap operas, hanging out with serial complainers or pursuing fat-free diets, according to a new book on getting ‘brain-fit’.
Global Climate Change…
This got posted to reddit.com with a title along the lines of “Pascal’s Wager Applied to Global Warming” which isn’t really what he is using (a grid which works with Pascal’s Wager, but God and Global Warming fall into vastly different “testability” categories), as he states in one of his videos (there are quite a few… check out this link and hit more under the “About This Video” to see the order to watch them in)…
Blake got me interested in finding out more about some of the specifics of Global Climate Change, and this was a very valuable resource for me.. Anyways, enjoy this intro to his series, and check out the rest if you like it… (Bit of a ZeFrank influence, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing…)
Giant sea scorpions were bigger than previously estimated
SCIENCE ALERT! The fossilized claw of a Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae (giant fucking scorpion) has been found in Germany and is now changing our previous estimates about how large these creatures actually were. These guys hung around in rivers and swamps and had nasty dispositions due to bad skin and lack of school friends. Their mothers were very concerned. More now from the BBC…
“The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers.
The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a German quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports.
The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp.
The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says.
The claw itself measures 46cm - indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human.”
via BBC
King Corn
Jar and I had discussed this concept a few times, lo and behold, someone made a documentary about it…
The future defined by Blake
| So im on digg last night and i run across this post about Yale scientists making giant 2 giant leaps forward in the field of quantum computing, when it suddenly dawns on me, “holy shit, that’s Blake’s team!”
. Blake Johnson, a friend of many years is an author on two papers in subsequent issues of the Journal Nature…
Here is the article from Blake’s lab’s website. The future of quantum computing is upon us and Blake is on the forefront of the research. WAY TO GO BLAKE! I’m so proud. |
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“My book tells a better story than your book…”
“… bitch.”
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Dr. Jason Lisle talks about the Planetarium at the Creation Museum.
Kick Ass Weekend
Have a great Labor Day weekend, everybody!
360° Light Field Display…
From the Graphics Lab @ USC Institute for Creative Technologies
We describe a set of rendering techniques for an autostereoscopic light field display able to present interactive 3D graphics to multiple simultaneous viewers 360 degrees around the display. The display consists of a high-speed video projector, a spinning mirror covered by a holographic diffuser, and FPGA circuitry to decode specially rendered DVI video signals. The display uses a standard programmable graphics card to render over 5,000 images per second of interactive 3D graphics, projecting 360-degree views with 1.25 degree separation up to 20 updates per second. We describe the system’s projection geometry and its calibration process, and we present a multiple-center-of-projection rendering technique for creating perspective-correct images from arbitrary viewpoints around the display. Our projection technique allows correct vertical perspective and parallax to be rendered for any height and distance when these parameters are known, and we demonstrate this effect with interactive raster graphics using a tracking system to measure the viewer’s height and distance. We further apply our projection technique to the display of photographed light fields with accurate horizontal and vertical parallax. We conclude with a discussion of the display’s visual accommodation performance and discuss techniques for displaying color imagery.
That’s way too cool…
