From the category archives:

Technology

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

September 17, 2009

Why waste your time with those "Did You Know?" videos (the fourth one has just been released; in lieu of a link please accept my earlier criticisms) when you can see the wonders of the future right here: I found the phone-catching demonstration near the end particularly astounding. (Via Spontaneous Symmetry)

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QOTD: slow and steady edition

September 15, 2009

Speaking to reporters at the 2009 Frankfurt Auto Show on Chrysler's reorganization plans, Dodge CEO Michael Accavitti made this perplexing statement: The future for the Dodge brand will be daring designs and agility and not just muscle and going from zero to 60 miles per hour in 10 seconds. It's probably just as well; 0-60 [...]

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Augmenting reality

September 3, 2009

BMW is actively researching the use of augmented reality for servicing cars: Augmented reality (AR) has been getting a lot of press for recent advancements on the iPhone and Android platforms. While it's nice to see these developments, thus far I've thought the excitement is a bit premature. It's as if we all know how [...]

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Tuesday light reading: Ars' Snow Leopard review

September 1, 2009

Ars Technica's review of Snow Leopard may take longer to read than the OS takes to install. I suggest you begin now.

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BMW's new concept

September 1, 2009

And speaking of progress, is anyone else incredibly excited by the Vision EfficientDynamics concept from BMW? Only a small fraction of these concept cars make it to productions with any semblance to the original design, but I still love to see them. Sure, the styling is extreme and the blue lighting is garish but... really, [...]

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Progress is magical

September 1, 2009

Scott Locklin writes an excellent and enjoyable blog, but I found his latest article for Taki Magazine extremely disappointing. Titled "The Myth of Technological Progress," it bemoans his perception that technology has not advanced in the last 50 years at nearly the same rate as in the previous half-century. (I know that the article plays [...]

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A real traffic network

August 25, 2009

Traffic (and cars more generally) are a particular interest of mine - both the algorithmic component (path finding and navigation) and the behavioral/mechanical side (see here). Today, Google announced that they are now crowdsourcing traffic data in Google Maps. This represents a fantastic use of technology, and one which I've often wondered why no one has [...]

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Roombaspotting

August 25, 2009

Paul Mathew at signaltheorist.com describes how he attached an LED to his new Roomba and tracked its motion around his room: There's a lot of processing going on inside that seemingly bumbling robot... [via Cool Infographics]

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Planet Earth is blue

July 8, 2009

This video is absolutely amazing. Filmed by cameras attached to the solid rocket boosters of the space shuttle Atlantis, it records the flight from liftoff to splashdown:

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Charting value (maybe) part 2 or: why you should never believe the internet

July 7, 2009

Back in May, I discussed a chart from Silicon Valley Insider which they claimed showed evidence of Microsoft's "laptop hunter" ads working by charting Microsoft and Apple popularity metrics. I found that the chart had a number of problems in its presentation, scale, and methodology and ultimately dismissed it as a poor analysis. Though there [...]

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Some things never change

June 29, 2009

New York City: consumers mob a popular flagship store, clamoring to be among the first to own the latest and greatest in technology. iPhone frenzy? Hardly. In 1945, Gimbels sold out of thousands of revolutionary (at the time) ballpoint pens for $12.50 each - or roughly $150 in 2009 dollars. Here's an ad from the [...]

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Rejoice, nerds!

June 25, 2009

HP is releasing iPhone versions of their iconic calculators. And yes, this is the second time I've covered iPhone calculators.

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The First Nerd

June 22, 2009

At the recent Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner, John Hodgman (you know him - he's a PC) followed Obama's humorous address with one of his own, delivering one of the funniest speeches I've had the pleasure of watching this year. Hodgman immediately identifies Obama as "the first nerd president of the modern era" and proceeds [...]

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Things that fascinate me: relief mapping

June 21, 2009

I've spent a couple days reading all about relief mapping (or a very similar algorithm called steep parallax mapping). Essentially these techniques implement ray tracing inside a texture map, resulting in dramatic representations of geometry without the need to render additional polygons. Key benefits include parallax tracking, occlusion, and self-shadowing again all without rendering extra [...]

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MetaBlogging 2.8

June 11, 2009

Aside... WordPress 2.8 is out of beta, and it's great. Much faster than the beta suggested it would be. Plus, you may notice that TGR's search is all fancy again, courtesy of the newly updated Search Unleashed plugin. Perfect for when you feel like seeing the nerdiest things I've written, all at once (last one on [...]

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The hidden cost of an iPhone 3GS

June 8, 2009

Apple's new iPhone 3GS is can be pre-ordered for just $199... unless you already have an iPhone. That's right, current iPhone users are not eligible for the subsidized price, and will have to shell out $600 for for the 16GB model, as disclosed in the footnotes of the pre-order page. AT&T is apparently telling some [...]

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Damn the physicists, full speed ahead!

June 3, 2009

Banners for WWDC are starting to go up at Moscone West. The main banner reads, "One year later. Light years ahead." Never mind the implication that Apple travels faster than light (or has a Time Machine). The laws of physics can not contain Steve Jobs!

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WordPress 2.8 beta 2 + TinyMCE 3.2.4 + Safari 4 beta = :) (finally)

May 25, 2009

WordPress 2.7 was released in December 2008 and represented a milestone in the software's development, incorporating a number of major changes in particular to the back end. One of the most visible was the inclusion of the latest TinyMCE post editor (version 3.2). Unfrotunately, TinyMCE 3.2 doesn't play nicely with the Safari 4 beta. Specifically, [...]

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Who is this wheelchair dude, and where is his vestibule?

May 24, 2009

If you type "observe" into Apple's thesaurus, the helpful app shows the word in a sentence: Who is this wheelchair dude, and where is his vestibule?

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Self-shadowing, briefly

May 20, 2009

The next great hurdle in consumer graphics technology is the successful implementation of self-shadowing. In every successive generation of graphics technology, programmers have made massive steps toward approximating the rendering equation. We've moved from simple vertices and shaded polygons to advanced geometry and multi-pass shader engines. But real-time graphics remain stuck in an uncanny valley [...]

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World Builder

April 15, 2009

An excellent short film for the futurist set: (be sure to click the HD button!)

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Signs of the times

April 5, 2009

The top two most-emailed stories on NYTimes.com right now are "I Hate My iPhone" and "The iPhone Gold Rush". The first is written by a woman who blames her poor spelling and lack of dexterity on her phone (you may remember this argument from such debates as "CDS killed the economy").  The second is about [...]

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Scary (but not surprising)

March 28, 2009

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries (NYTimes)

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InfoGraphics in motion

March 26, 2009

One of my favorite music videos is Royskopp's Remind Me, because of it's cleverly informative visual style, not unlike an animated airplane safety card or pictograph instruction pamphlet: Recently, a student named Tomas Nilsson has reinterpreted the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood in similar fashion: In fact, the style bears some resemblance to the Microsoft [...]

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Rendering Cleverness

March 25, 2009

Austin Robinson of NVIDA makes an excellent point during his introduction of a new CUDA-based ray casting engine (NVIRT) at I3D'09 [paraphrased from his slides]: Rasterization is fast, but needs cleverness to produce complex visual effects. Ray tracing robustly supports complex visual effects, but needs cleverness to be fast. This is especially interesting because it [...]

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Dreams of Kurzweil

March 25, 2009

Microsoft's heavily-rotoscoped vision of 2019... I can't wait: For the closet futurists among you wondering about the title reference, see the "2019" chapter of Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines .

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MouthOff

March 25, 2009

Thought this was funny - a new iPhone app called MouthOff:

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Progress in Safari 4

March 1, 2009

Update 6/8/09: The release version of Safari 4 went with none of these. One of my favorite Safari features is that the address bar doubles as a progress bar, whereas most browsers place a progress bar at the bottom of the screen, taking up real estate. This is how mobile Safari works on the iPhone [...]

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The sound of a million MobileMe subscribers screaming

February 10, 2009

Google has released a beta of Google Sync for Mobile which includes support for various smartphones including the iPhone. Previously, only Blackberries were supported.  The beta, which was announced this morning on the Google Mobile blog, introduces true push syncing for Google calendar and Google contacts. In my mind, this is the nail in the [...]

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