Klingon Christmas Carol

Epic Ripping of Phantom Menace

Then again, this is probably the funniest educational film ever.

Iron Man 2 Trailer

It's finally here.

Worth it just for the final few seconds with War Machine

Student Orchestra Performs Music with iPhones

You could get skilled with the piano after years of practice, but imagine how good you’d be at playing an instrument you invented.

A college course and the iPhone are making that possible for computer-science students at the University of Michigan.

Now, at the end of the course, the class ensemble of 11 students are preparing to put on a live concert — one where every musician’s instrument is an iPhone.

Taught by Georg Essl, an assistant professor of computer science and music, the course (titled “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble“) trains students to code their own musical instruments for the iPhone, using the Apple-provided software-development kit.

“What’s interesting is we blend the whole process,” Essl said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “We start from nothing. We teach the programming of iPhones for multimedia stuff, and then we teach students to build their own instruments.”

“We don’t stop there,” he continued. “We don’t just see this as an engineering exercise. We want to do the whole process where we start from nothing, and then we go to performance next week in a live concert, where people can come and listen to the outcome of what students have learned in the course.”

The advantage of digital music can be seen in instruments as far back as the electric guitar: the flexibility to manipulate bits of code to create different sounds, superseding the limitations of a traditional analog instrument. Naturally, technological advancement keeps raising electronic sound to new heights. In recent years, musicians have been experimenting with gadgets ranging from laptops to high-tech cellos, and from cellphones to bent circuits.

Essl said he’s been playing music with mobile phones since 2005, but the iPhone is unique because it starts out as a highly sophisticated blank slate with multiple sensors: a full touchscreen, a microphone, GPS, compass, wireless sensor and accelerometer.

Using the iPhone SDK and some supplemental audio tools provided by Essl, students in the course learn to program the device to play different sounds, based on the information it receives from one of its multitude of sensors. Tapping the display, shaking the phone or blowing air into the mic, for example, can all translate into different sounds.

Students in the class are experimenting with the iPhone in a wild variety of ways, Essl said. One student’s instrument uses the iPhone’s video-savvy screen and microphone to synesthetically work the relationship between color and sound. Another student is exploring what the iPhone can do with feedback and distortion.

“I think it’s an interesting spread,” Essl said. “People come to it not with a literal sense of, ‘I know piano. I want to build a mobile phone piano.’ They have a concept.”

The Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble will perform Dec. 9 at 8 p.m. in the university’s Britton Recital Hall.

Source: Wired.

Shatner's Written Scene in J.J. Abram's Star Trek

What would have been like if William Shatner made his "cameo."

Star Trek: Generations

"Rock Band" Yoko Ono

Does Cold Weather Injure Cell Phones? Abusive Lab Test

 You know that cold weather can make your cell phone sluggish, or make a fully charged one read low battery. But can cold weather do serious damage to your phone? We decided to find out, subjecting six phones to progressively lower temperatures until they stopped working. Then, for good measure, we dunked some of them in liquid nitrogen. What happens when normal gadgets meet extreme cold? Read on to find out.

By Seth Porges

Illustrations by Dogo

Published in the December 2009 issue. 

We tend to assume that extreme cold and mobile devices just don’t mix. After all, cold temperatures can freeze liquid-crystal displays and slow the chemical reaction that gives lithium-ion batteries their charge.

But bringing phones into the cold is unavoidable—if you’ve ever gone skiing, or you simply live in Chicago, you’ve certainly spent hours in a freezing environment with nothing more than a layer of denim or a jacket pocket to shield your phone from the chill.

Exactly how cold can a phone get before it stops working? We decided to find out. For help, we called up our friends at Environ Laboratories, an environmental testing facility in Minneapolis used by the defense, aerospace and technology industries to simulate extreme conditions. We gave Environ a sample of six phones from various manufacturers. These models were the type of commodity phones that service providers often give away for free with new contracts—none was billed as “ruggedized” or designed to withstand extreme temperatures. Environ’s job was to freeze the gadgets in a temperature-controlled chamber (lowest possible setting: minus 100 F) until all six phones stopped working—no matter how much cold that required.  

In other words, we decided to push these phones way beyond the limits of their design parameters and warranties. Beginning at 40 F (the equivalent of a brisk autumn evening in New England), we let each phone run for 30 minutes before bringing the temperature down by 10 degrees. We repeated this incremental temperature drop every half-hour until the phones stopped working. Once a phone died, we gave it one last dash of mercy by bringing it back to room temperature to see if warmth could revive it.

Other than minor hiccups (slight screen dimming, slow key response), none of the phones had any real problems down to minus 10 F, when the low-battery indicator popped up on one Samsung, despite the fact that it had recently been charged. At minus 20, the same phone shut off (plugging it in and turning it on quickly revived it), and the displays of some of the other phones were difficult to read.

Thirty below is where the real fun began, with five of the six phones experiencing serious battery or LCD problems—the display on a Nokia became an unreadable block of blue, while bizarre bars polluted another phone’s screen.

Another 10 degrees, down to minus 40, and all but one of the phones was rendered inoperable. The last phone standing, an old Motorola Krzr belonging to a PM staffer, actually remained functional until about minus 55 F, when its battery died.

Remarkably, none of the damage appeared to be permanent—all it took was a return to room temperature to bring all of the phones back to life.

Still, we’re electronic sadists, and we weren’t going to let our access to Environ’s environmental testing facility—and its vats of liquid nitrogen—go to waste. Sure, the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth was just minus 128.6 F (and the continental U.S. has never dropped below minus 70) but we couldn’t resist finding out how our toughest competitor could handle a dunk in a minus 314.7 F bucket of liquid nitrogen. 

  

Amazingly, the Motorola phone survived multiple dips in the coolant. The sub-sub-sub-zero swims caused its battery to shut down, but once the phone was warmed up, it came back to life with no visible damage. We even dropped the frozen phone to the floor from hip height. And although we expected it to shatter, the fall barely caused any damage. In fact, it wasn’t until we dunked the Krzr in the liquid nitrogen four times, and then forcibly threw it to the ground, that it finally called it quits. Even then, the screen still turned on when the phone was plugged in (although it was unreadable), and, amazingly, the audio still worked. Some keys even appeared to produce a response.

The results were reassuring, if not astonishing. The bottom line: Alaska residents might endure some screen problems or short-lived batteries on cold days, but nothing a warm room couldn’t cure. And if our phone can handle repeated swims in one of the coldest liquids on earth, yours can surely survive a day on the slopes without worry.  

Source: Popular Mechanics

HAL's bells: IBM makes 'thinking computer' breakthrough

All your Cheezburgers belong to us!

Scientists say they've made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain - an effort that tests the limits of technology.

Even the world's most powerful supercomputers can't replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can't imagine a wall painted a different colour, for instance, or picture a person's face and connect that to an emotion.

If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks - by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, among other things - they could unleash tremendous insights in such diverse fields as medicine and economics.

A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near.

But this week researchers from IBM are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer.

The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory - 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

The scientists had previously simulated 40 per cent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1 per cent of a human's cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers.

The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, doesn't mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats.

The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat's brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat's brain work together.

The researchers created a program that told the supercomputer, which is in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to behave how a brain is believed to behave.

The computer was shown images of corporate logos, including IBM's, and scientists watched as different parts of the simulated brain worked together to figure out what the image was.

Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, called it a "truly unprecedented scale of simulation."

Researchers at Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were also part of the project.

Modha says the research could lead to computers that rely less on "structured" data, such the input 2 plus 2 equals 4, and can handle ambiguity better, like identifying the corporate logo even if the image is blurry.

Or such computers could incorporate senses like sight, touch and hearing into the decisions they make.

One reason that development would be significant to IBM: The company is selling "smarter planet" services that use digital sensors to monitor things like weather and traffic and feed that data into computers that are asked to do something with the information, like predicting a tsunami or detecting freeway accidents.

Other companies could use "cognitive computing" to make better sense of large volumes of information.

Jim Olds, a neuroscientist and director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, called the new research a "tremendous step."

Olds, who was not involved in IBM's work, said neuroscientists have been amassing data about how the brain works much like "stamp collectors," without a way to tie it together.

"We've made tremendous advances in collecting data, but we don't have a collective theory yet for how this complex organ called the brain produces things like Shakespeare's sonnets and Mozart's symphonies," he said.

"The holy grail for neuroscientists is to map activity from single nerve cells, which they know about, into how billions of nerve cells act in concert."

Modha says a simulation of a human cortex could come within the next decade if Moore's Law holds. That's the rule of thumb that the number of transistors on a computer chip tends to double every two years.

Yet Olds cautioned that simulating the human brain is "such a complex problem that we may not be able to get to an answer, even with supercomputing."

"There are no guarantees in this game because the sheer complexity of the problem really dwarfs anything we've tried to do," he said.

Source: AP

Crysis goes Back to the Future

Crysis mod allows you to drive the DeLorean with flux capacitor, time circuits and all.



At least it's not this, from Mr. Cinemassacre, James Wolfe:

Controller Ornaments for the Holidays.

Source:  Ponoko.com

My only regrets is that there seemingly is no love for the Super Nintendo or hand-helds.

Banned PSN player sues Nintendo and Microsoft

The judge should just sentence him for wasting the court's time and resources instead of just throwing it out.  Any lawyer who takes this should have his license revoked.  I didn't think in the world of games it could get more embarrassing than Jack Thompson, but here comes this guy.  Picture about sums it up.

 
After being banned from the PlayStation Network for hateful comments stated in Resistance's online community, Erik Estavillo launched not one, but two, lawsuits against Sony for infringing on his "first amendment rights" -- an argument that was shot down by Judge Ronald Whyte simply because "Sony is not part of the government."

However, what Estavillo lacks in civil online discourse, he makes up for with sheer determination and persistence. In addition to Sony, he now has both Microsoft and Nintendo in his sights. Estavillo is seeking $75,000 from Microsoft for the "undue stress" and "sadness" caused by his Xbox 360's RROD. "Microsoft should have to bear the burden that is now put on the shoulders of this disabled plaintiff," his claim states -- a burden that is equivalent to the sum of 375 Xbox 360 systems, apparently. Nintendo is being sued for interfering with Estavillo's "pursuit of happiness." And how exactly is Nintendo doing that? "Deleting, blocking or prohibiting the Homebrew Channel and Ocarina applications" via a system update.

We're hoping you can see the sheer brilliance of Estavillo's strategy. He's offering the perfect opportunity for PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo fans to agree on something for once.


Source: Joystiq

Law Firm Sniffing Around Xbox Live Class Action Suit

A law firm that specializes in consumer class action lawsuits is probing the recent purging of Xbox Live accounts in what may be a setup for future litigation.

Inc Gamers noticed that AbingtonIP currently has a form on its website asking those affected by the ban—and who were not refunded a prorated sum for their time remaining on Xbox Live—to send in pertinent information. The law firm writes, “Microsoft has chosen to use one of the most indiscriminate 'weapons' in its arsenal in an effort to combat piracy -- as a result, use of this 'weapon' has resulted in a great deal of collateral damage -- many people were affected who had nothing to do with piracy.”

AbingtonIP calls the timing of the widespread ban “convenient,” in light of the pending, post-ban release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and thinks the ban may have resulted in a boost to Xbox Live subscription revenues. If the ban had been enacted before the release of MW2 and Halo 3: ODST, the law firm supposes that sales of both games would likely have been “greatly diminished.”

Source: Game Politics

Danish Flash Game Allows Users to Beat Women

Stuff kind of writes itself.

Sorry for the strong language, but this is the title of a new social campaign from Denmark. The campaign is literally in your face as you have to punch the featured girl to get the message. Most disturbing is that you want to go all the way through, which make you feel like a 100% idiot once finished. But the message, even though it's in Danish, is very clear.

Note: The link above blocks any IP outside of Denmark.

Source: Adverblog

Ain't Love Grand?

A man is marrying Nene Anegasaki.  The two are getting "married" in a church in Guam. She's the ideal woman...in pixelated form.  She's a video game character in a dating sim game, Love Plus.  No plans on what's going to happen for the honeymoon, but the wedding ceremony is going to be streamed live on November 22.

The "lucky" woman

Source: Tiny Cartridge

What's Next? Hamlet Starring Calculon?

 Funny thing is, I took one of Robin Murphy's engineering classes when I went to USF.  She should definitely get Matt Groening on speed dial.

Robots Perform Shakespeare

By Chuck Squatriglia

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been updated for the 21st century with seven small robots playing fairies alongside carbon-based co-stars.
Beyond being a cool thing to do, researchers saw bringing bots to the Bard as a chance to introduce robots to the public and see how people interact with them. Their findings could influence how robots are designed and how they’re used in search-and-rescue operations.
“It’s now possible for these unmanned aerial vehicles to be used for evacuation or crowd control,” said Robin Murphy, a computer science and engineering professor at Texas A&M University, which staged the production. “But what’s missing is an understanding of what makes a person trust or fear the robot.”
Murphy can change that. She leads the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, and her bots have combed the rubble of the World Trade Center, crawled into caved-in mines and searched collapsed buildings around the world. But this is the first time they’ve taken to the stage, and it provided some interesting insights.
The play was a collaboration between the university’s computer science, electrical engineering and performance studies departments. Purists may balk at reworking one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays to include robots, but director Amy Hopper jumped at the chance.
“What’s great is that they have been part of the production from the beginning, and the robots seem more and more like characters that have always been part of the story,” she said. “To see them flying, spinning and bouncing through the air just adds to the magic and mystery of the world Shakespeare created.”
The biggest of the mechanical stars was an AirRobot with four rotors. It’s about the size of a large pizza. Cops and soldiers use them for surveillance, and they’ve been deployed in Iraq. It was joined by a squadron of E-Flight micro helicopters about the size of your fist. Casting them in a play was a great chance to see how man and machine interact and what can be done to make robots more like humans.
“There’s all this potential for robots to play a more affective role,” Murphy said. “There isn’t a book we can go to that says ‘Do this.’ But performing-arts people know all about this.”
During several months of rehearsals and eight performances that ended Sunday, Murphy and her colleagues Dylan Shell and Takis Zourntos found the actors and audience had little fear of the robots but scant understanding of how they work or how delicate they are. People invariably would handle them roughly, leading to occasional damage and crashes — one reason Murphy provided three AirRobots and 22 micro-copters.
“People’s expectations of robots don’t match those of roboticists,” Murphy said. “When the little robots would crash during rehearsal, the actors would just pick it up and throw it into the air thinking it would fly. We saw the audience do similar things.”
The rough handling softened, however, when the actors were told to think of the bots as baby fairies. After that, the actors began showing concern if the bots crashed. In other words, they bonded with the machines. That could have big implications for the design of search and rescue robots, which might be the first thing to reach, for instance, someone trapped in a collapsed mineshaft and their only contact with the outside world for hours. If it were you in that hole, would you want to be stuck with a cold machine like T-1000 or a friendly one like WALL-E?
“That robot is your medium to the world,” Murphy said. “If it behaves in a way that’s disrespectful or frustrating or creepy, you’ll stop listening to the directions coming through it from a search and rescue crew, a doctor or anyone else.”
Murphy discovered something else about the robots, particularly the micro-copters. People trusted them and wanted to follow them around. That’s perfect for, say, search and rescue situations where you’re leading people to safety. It’s not so good when you’re using aerial vehicles to control a rioting crowd. That suggests engineers and roboticists should consider what purpose a bot will serve, and thus adjust its appearance, color and sound accordingly.
“We need additional research on how to make them move like friendly hummingbirds or angry bees to get the desired effect,” Murphy said, offering two examples of how a robot might be tailored to match its purpose.
The play closed Sunday, but the work continues. Murphy would like to see more plays starring robots and said NASA is interested in similar research to see how people interact with machines. In the meantime, she and her colleagues are sifting through their findings.
“We’re going to continue looking over our results to codify what we’ve learned,” she said. “Hopefully this will lead to robots that are more trustworthy and can convey the information they need to get across to help you.”
Photos: Texas A&M University.

Source: Wired

 

Jabba the Cake

TampaBay.com

Top 10 - Cyborg Videos

Among them:

Robo-Monkey -




Pong with Brain Waves -




Mouse in VR Maze -




Source: Wired

Han Solo Table

Now, you too can be like Jabba the Hutt and own your own "Han Solo in carbonite" desk. The creator Tom Spina doesn't own the licensing rights. He has to call it a "sci-fi themed desk."

He also has Captain Kirk's chair called, "The Galactic Throne."

Source: Wired

Paranormal Activity Deleted Scenes

Would have made the movie more watchable:

Swedish Retailer reliquishes Pirate Bay Logo

From Wired:

Swedish Retailer Pirates the Pirate Bay Logo

By David Kravets

 A Swedish online clothing and tech retailer has assumed ownership of The Pirate Bay’s logo and plans to market the iconic pirate ship – with a cassette-tape image and crossbones — on USB sticks.

The company, Sandryds Handel, registered the logo with Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office. The Pirate Bay founders, who face a year in prison pending the outcome of their criminal appeal for facilitating copyright infringement, had never registered the mark and have always allowed it to be reproduced.
At least one of the four Pirate Bay founders didn’t think the changeover was amusing, saying the image should remain in the public domain. It’s worth noting that The Pirate Bay’s disdain for private ownership of intellectual property doesn’t extend to its domain name, which it agreed to sell for about $8 million, in a deal that now looks all but dead.
Peter Sunde, one of the four convicted Pirate Bay co-founders, told TorrentFreak that that the Bay would challenge the intellectual property office’s decision to grant control of the image’s rights to Sandryds Handel.
“They took it from the public … and turned it into their logo that they control,” Sunde added on Twitter Monday. “It’s a publicly owned logo.”
In an interview with Swedish media, Sandryds Handel spokesman Bengt Wessborg explained the company’s move.
“The idea is to sell USB drives using this brand,” he said. “We saw that it was not already allocated to someone else. It was not registered.”

Update: 11 - 18:

The Swedish online retailer that had trademarked a near replica of The Pirate Bay’s iconic logo has agreed to withdraw registration of what has become an enduring symbol of online piracy, Swedish media reported Wednesday.
The move by Sandryds Handel came two days after Peter Sunde, one of The Pirate Bay co-founders, complained to Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office.
The Pirate Bay, now 6 years old, has always left the mark in the public domain, to where it has been returned – meaning anybody can market the symbol.
Sandryds Handel said Monday it was going to place the logo on USB sticks. The company told Swedish media that it would market a “media player” affixed with the logo.
The development comes a day after The Pirate Bay announced it was decommissioning the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker and instead would push copyrighted files of movies, music, games and software via DHT and PEX technologies.
Pending appeal, the Pirate Bay’s four co-founders face a year in prison each and millions in fines after their April convictions in a Stockholm court of facilitating copyright infringement.

 

Scooby Doo and the Zombie Apocalypse (Or I Am Velma)

Caught this on Boing Boing.net:

Will Smith's got nothing on Velma.

Nice new way of proposing.

From Gizmodo

Diamonds Are Forever, But Human Teeth Are Disgusting Beyond Any Temporal Classification

As long as Man polishes stones to woo women, the diamond will rein supreme. But diamonds are expensive and hard to find. And teeth? I've got plenty of free teeth right here.
By Australian silversmith Polly van der Glas, this teeth jewelry, well...it's kind of like ivory with a touch of plaque—I mean—patina. And the "stones" make a fashionable defensive alternative to brass knuckles.
Look, we know this stuff is horrendous. But really, it's only just as offensive as Kay's latest heart crossed with lips cross with angels pendant. So there. [Van Der Glas via ecoutree via inhabitat]

How to connect an XBox 360 without buying a wireless adapter.

Personally I don't know why Microsoft did not install built-in wireless capability from the get go or even install it in their future models of the XBox 360.

You can do it without spending the extra $99 or anywhere near that price for Microsoft's own wireless adapter.  If you have a latop, netbook or a desktop capable of going Wifi, here's what you do (for any Windows OS):

1.) Go to control panel.
2.) Go to network connections.
3.) Shift-left click the wireless and Ethernet connections to select them both.
4.) Right-click on either icon, while both are being selected.
5.) Select "Bridge Connection."

Once the connections are "bridged," you can now connect an Ethernet cable from your XBox 360 to your computer and now you're capable of connecting to XBox Live once you turn on your machine.

If this doesn't work off the bat, you may have to unplug your router first, then reset the modem, then plug the router again about 1-2 minutes later.

At long last, Star Wars Meets Star Trek

R2-D2 makes a cameo appearance in J.J. Abram's Star Trek.  Of course it's pointed out after the fact for the home release.

http://gizmodo.com/5405276/confirmed-r2+d2-finally-discovered-in-star-trek