Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
June 11th, 2010 | 
Author: I just spotted this on BoingBoing and while Maggie calls it a reminder for modern life, I’d be willing to bet that it’s very old.
Think about it: when was the last time you saw a warning label on anything that gave you credit for the goo between your ears? Normally these things assume that the user is a mentally deficient interplanetary alien that needs everything explained to them: “Warning, this coffee is hot”, “Danger, this plastic bag is not a toy”, “Don’t use this hairdryer in the shower”, etc. This one happens to be on a rental floor sander that she and her husband are using. The scary drum-type that can eat into your floor in no time.
Kind of refreshing, isn’t it?
h/t to Maggie at BoingBoing.
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This is cool. Tristan Jehan, from the MIT Media lab has come up with a nifty bit of code to turn any piece of music into a swing number. No, I’m not kidding.
The python script works by time-stretching the first half of each beat, while time-shrinking the second half. Check out White Rabbit:
I should feed Iggy and the Stooges into it and see what comes out. 
Watching this one move stirs an interesting mix of emotions. First was “Eww, it moves like a bug”, quickly followed by “Cool, it moves like a bug!”, followed again by “That’s so COOL!”, then followed by “WANT! Must have!”
Even better is that it’s a kit, available from the MakerShed.
I love ads. It drives Bridget crazy, though. She likes to mute the ads on tv when they come on, but I insist on listening. 
It takes some amazing talent to cram a meaningful message into a 30-second spot. Even more so to be creative and memorable about it.
Alec Brownstein was looking for a job with an ad agency in New York and hit upon a genius plan: sponsor a few keywords on Google so that your interest in work showed up in the search results of the people hiring.
That’s not the genius part. What’s genius is the words he chose to sponsor: the names of the people doing the hiring. If any of these people Googled the own names (and who doesn’t?), his ad would show at the top of the results. He got a job:
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From Slashdot:
“Stanford’s Junior, the robot car that took second place at DARPA’s Grand Challenge in 2007, has learned how to perform a tire-squealing 180-degree spin into a skin-tight parking space. Similar to a James Bond action scene, the maneuver is impressive and would be extremely difficult for a human to pull off. We won’t be handing the keys over to robot cars anytime soon, but Stanford shows us that at least for some driving tasks robot cars can already meet or even exceed human ability.”
This particular car can in second in the Grand Challenge. I don’t know what Carnegie Mellon’s Boss is up to, but I welcome our new robotic vehicular overlords.
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Boy, I’m glad I’m not some guy named Tom living in PA. This would be pretty scary, otherwise:
