The Telepresent Texan: computers

Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Let's see if it can support multiple embeds and/or TED embeds on the same page

What strikes me about this is that it seems to bring a different kind of 3-D to the table than the stereoscopic or simple rendered kind. The drawback, of course, is that you only have one person who can experience this at a time, but if you have somebody sitting in front of a computer screen(which tends to be one person watching the monitor, or playing a one-player video game), then it's not an issue.

What I'd be interested to see here is whether this video posts properly from blogger

Here's the thing I notice here: look how much time is spent distracting you from actually directly interacting with him. You might have some nice little AI tricks regarding him noticing or taking interests with things you do, but you only get real interaction after having been narratively tunnelled into a certain conversation that has certain social expectations attached to it

But I do have to say it's a neat trick. But is it going to seem all that neat as others develop this kind of interaction more extensively?

Monday, September 21, 2009

Science and Technology Links for 9/21/09

Scientists Create First Ever Magnetic Gas

Moon May Beat Pluto as Coldest Place in Solar System

Panasonic's Robotic Bed Transforms into a Mobile Chair, Makes Standing Up Obsolete

DARPA Wants A Few Good Space Debris Cleaners

New from Boeing: Flying Bot Swarms You Control With Body Language

New Material Brings IBM's Super-High-Density Memory Closer to Market

Popular Mechanics

The Guide to Home Geothermal Energy

5 Realistic Lessons in Radical Consumption From No Impact Man

Behind Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs' 3D Food FX (With Video!)

Weird Stories of Objects Falling From the Sky-Explained

The Flying Future for America's Missile Shield

Top 8 Next-Gen, Alt Fuel Cars at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show

Top 10 Most Dangerous Plants in the World

Discover Magazine

What does 3.6 million pounds of thrust look like?

Planck First Light

How Long Would It Take a Physics Lecture to Actually Kill You?

The Real Problem With a Human Trip to Mars: Radiation

How to Make Water Drops Bounce Off Each Other Like Beach Balls

Body Attacks Self; Body Protects Self

Scientific American

Algaeus lives! A modified Prius goes cross-country on fuel from algae

NASA's moon orbiter returns promising early data in the hunt for lunar water ice

Torture Interferes with Memory

Better Materials Could Build a Green Construction Industry

Conditional Consciousness: Patients in Vegetative States Can Learn, Predicting Recovery

Technology Review

Laser-Triggered Chemical Reactions

A Silver Lining for the Government's Cloud

Geoengineering May Be Necessary, Despite Its Perils

Games Company Declares War on Gold Farmers

Blueprint for a Quantum Electric Motor

Riding a Slingshot into Space

Ars Technica

If spectrum isn't scarce anymore, can you say $#!% on TV?

DOJ: Google book settlement needs major rewrite

FCC Chairman wants network neutrality, wired and wireless

A trip down memory lane and beyond at Vintage Computer Fest

IE program manager endorses HTML 5 multimedia tags

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Science and Technology Links for week of 9/14/09

Discover Magazine

Rock Solid Evidence of a Rocky, Earth-like Exoplanet

Jupiter Grabbed a Comet for 12 Years, Then Flung It Back Out

To Save the Planet From Global Warming, Turn the Sahara Green

Did Your Morning Shower Spray You With Bacteria?

How Does the Brain Use So Much Energy? Not in Electrical Signals.

Scientists Map Out Gravitational Space Highways

Man Ray Meets Mr. Wizard in Sugimoto's "Lightning Fields" Photos

Nanotubes Could Enable Self-Repairing Electronic Circuits

How Much Can You Really Learn With a Free Online Education?

PopSci U: Seven of the Country's Coolest SciTech Courses

Newly Refurbished Hubble Sends Back Stunning First Images

Scientific American

Six Russian Volcanoes Erupt

Detecting Digitally Altered Video

When an Electric Car Dies, What Will Happen to the Battery?

Drilling Project Pulls Up Evidence for Early Oxygen in the Oceans

Why Does Music Make Us Feel?

Gene therapy: An Interview with an Unfortunate Pioneer

Popular Mechanics

Launch System Skepticism Grows at Space 2009: Guest Analysis

Why NASA Should Bomb the Moon to Find Water: Analysis

Debunking 5 Prevalent Swine Flu Myths

9: The Making of a Stitchpunked World

Neill Blomkamp Explains the Origin of District 9's Aliens

Technology Review

Ultradense, 3-D Data Storage

Superefficient Solar from Nanotubes

A Device to Spot Autism Early

A Salt and Paper Battery

More Efficient, and Cheaper, Solar Cells

Ars Technica

Hands on: limitations of Google Fast Flip make it a novelty

Last.fm Scrobbles coming to a radio near you on October 5

Five essential things to know about evolution

WebKit adoption shows strong momentum for WebGL 3D graphics

AT&T to FCC: gaming is not "broadband," but an added service

Intel's new flash tech to bring back Turbo Memory, for real

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Science and Technology Links for 8/3/09

Experiment Looks to Bridge Classical Physics and Quantum Mechanics

Test Drive: Nissan's Leaf, The Electric Car's First Shot at the Mainstream

NASA Panel To Recommend Manned MIssions To Asteroids, Venus Fly-Bys

Clippy Enlists - I still say "Clippy must die."

Laser-Powered Lightcraft "At the Cusp of Commercial Reality" - Robert Heinlein actually referred to this in a story where a straight-talking black lady becomes president by a fluke of fate. This is one of the projects she pushes. Now what I'm interested in are the power requirements and relative noisiness of a pulsed detonation based system.

Discover Magazine:

Hail the Spleen: An Underappreciated Organ Gets the Credit It Deserves

Ripped From the Journals: The Biggest Discoveries of the Week

Comets Not So Likely to Smash Into Earth and Kill Us All - Good.

How Much of Your Memory Is True?

Scientific American:

Stuck Mars rover passing its time as an observatory

Global Warming Beliefs

Are Contaminants Silencing Our Genes?

Colorado power company wants to ratchet up fees on solar freeloaders- that is, people generating power of their own through solar panels on their roofs. I know, it's as dumb as it sounds.

Popular Mechanics

5 Extremely Dumb Military Designs from G.I. Joe

CSI Myths: The Shaky Science Behind Forensics

The Key to the Battery-Powered House

Collision Course: The Need for Better Space Junk Regulations

Technology Review

A Better Way to Rank Expertise Online

A New Approach to Fusion - Seems fascinating, but I'm conflicted about the whole moving (and colliding) parts element of the reactor.

Crowdsourcing Closer Government Scrutiny

How to Land Safely Back on the Moon

Nanotube-Powered X-Rays

Smoothing the Way for Light - computing using Plasmons, 2-Dimensional waves of light moving over a surface.

Solar Industry: No Breakthroughs Needed - Solar industry is arguing that solar power is cost efficient enough as it is now to compete with fossil fuel industries.

Five Futuristic Interfaces on Display at SIGGRAPH - The first and last seem to me to be the ones with greatest potential.

How Dragon Kings Could Trump Black Swans - Sounds like the setup for an anime series, but its really about something more interesting!

Ars Technica

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 release dates

The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world- I'm not quite as convinced as this guy of the poor prospects of word. What people are looking for in a format like words is some kind of permanence, and richness of content. As an editor of content who both writes prose and screenplay in the medium, it helps that Word can do all kinds of work in making discrete files of its kind. I find that inputs in wikis and other such media often lack the kind of editing tools that allow you to create good looking text and quality writing. So in my opinion, there's not much good in burying Word just yet.

Reports: US' best source of carbon-free energy is efficiency

Network neutrality in Congress, round 3: Fight!

Google reveals plans for Chrome cloud synchronization

Microsoft's Seadragon helps you share large images

My Kindle ate my homework: lawsuit filed over 1984 deletion

Super speed: a brief history of USB 3.0, 2007-2018

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Science and Technology Links for the Week of 7/27/09

Can Bacteria Create a Cement Wall to Hold Back the Sahara?

Tiny Structures in Beetle's Shell Twist Light, Giving It a Green Sheen

Scientists Design Versatile Self-Assembling Nanogears

Surf Anywhere, Inside a Giant Wheel

First Ever Nanoscale Mass Spectrometer

Building the World's Wimpiest Space Thruster-Harder Than It Sounds

The Inspiring Boom in "Super-Earths"

Blue Food Dye Helps Rats With Spinal Injuries-But Also Turns Them Blue

The Satellite That Aims to Succeed Where Icarus Failed

The Violent, Mysterious Dynamics of Star Formation

Programmable Matter Moves From Sci-Fi to Sci-Real- I actually have read the book (non-fiction) this guy wrote. The idea is certainly intriguing, that is, using quantum dots to artificially mimic different materials and their properties, but my science and technology instincts tell me that his predictions, like those of K. Eric Drexler of Nanotechnology fame before him, will be scaled back and modified as we confront the real world engineering challenges associated with them. That isn't to say, though, that I don't find the possibilities exciting, should even just a small fraction of them become reality.

Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts? - The title's theory is a bit dubious, but the discussion of how quantum behavior like tunneling and random walk wavefront collapses are intriguing.

Imaginary Friends- An article that talks about research indicating that social loneliness can be alleviated by watching television and following the lives of characters. Not that I do that too much. sob ;-)

Rewards, dopamine and the brain: Could pennies and pills help you learn better?

Metamaterial Improves Resolution of MRI Scans

Cheaper Solar Thermal Power - I saw a Stirling engine used on one of those 60 Symbols videos I told you about before. Strikes me as an intuitively brilliant idea. I just have to wonder what's being used to transfer the heat.

There is no WiFi allergy: newspapers misreport PR as science - Aren't we glad?

The Wii is born again: Ars reviews Wii Sports Resort

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Science Links Digest #1

For some time now, I've been pulling together some science and technology links to send to my boss about science and technology. I've been thinking it might be nice to publish some of these in a blog entry, so other readers can have a glimpse at some of the amazing, fascinating and interesting things going on in the world.

A word on my technique: This is essentially my digest of highlights, mostly of applied and practical science from Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, Technology review, and now Ars Technica. I might include others as time goes on, but I'm mainly working on those few core websites, to keep things simple.

In the meantime, here's my collection of links:

SpaceX Successfully Delivers First Payload to Space

NASA to De-Orbit International Space Station In 2016

Cambridge Physicists Devise Working Scientific Model for Successful Revolutions

Ever Wonder What Those Science Symbols Really Mean?

Video: Antares DLR-H2 Becomes the First 100% Fuel-Cell Powered Plane

Researchers Work Towards a Shirt That Can Take Pictures

Behind the Scenes & Under the Hood: Virtuality's Antimatter Spacecraft Engine

To Cope with Cold Winters, Polar Dinosaurs Burrowed Beneath the Ground

Did Galileo Spot Neptune Two Centuries Before Its "Discovery"?

10 Wind Turbines That Push the Limits of Design

Why New Chrome OS Won't Turn Google Into a Monopoly: Analysis

A Costly and Unnecessary New Electricity Grid

Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse

How Features Graduate from Gmail Labs

Hints of How Google's OS Will Work

Pink Silicon Is the New Black

Office 2010: Tech Preview now, free Web apps in August

Windows 7 coming to Volume Licensing in September