Voxopolis
Computer generated cities based on Conway’s Game of Life:
voxopolis from Dino Rossi on Vimeo.
On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing
The darndest thing happened in the last five days and I was fortunate to be privy to it. Apple has gotten people excited about computing.
But this time, it’s not nerds or geeks and certainly not IT industry analysts. It’s everyone else.
I had a curious set of three conversations this week. One with a grandma, one with a technophobe and the third with a self-proclaimed luddite.
northtemple – On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing
Our world may be a giant hologram
“If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.
[...] Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
Our world may be a giant hologram – New Scientist.
TWITCH
TWITCH is a series of minimal games within small windows. How fast can you solve them all? Each game only responds to clicking; mouse position and keyboard are ignored.
Even though it says it was created to work exclusively with Google Chrome, it works great in Safari as well. Built using processing.js i believe.
Of course, the moment I leave God’s Own Country (that’s the United Kingdom to you, johnny foreigner), my phone will shed about a hundred IQ points and half its metabolism. 7.2MB 3G connection over the air in North America? Forget it, travelling man. No more watching the news on the phone for you. You’ll take the local flavour of gimpy GPRS and like it. And we’ll charge you fifteen quid for every 25MB you eat. [...] I hate that I lose so much of my outboard brain functions when I go to North America. I practically had a seizure from the thin bandwidth in Vancouver four years back.
Warren Ellis » I Think Of Dean Moriarty
shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet that can be applied to your browser to hide comments on many popular web sites without user intervention.
The Failure of Empathy
As many others have noted, the release of the iPad might be the cannonball into the consumer device pool the iPhone dipped its toes in. It’s also been referred to as a thing that sits between that iPhone and your laptop. I see it as more of a fork in the road. It’s the thing many people will get INSTEAD of a laptop.
The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.
Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy
Microsoft’s Creative Destruction
This New York Times Op-Ed piece by Dick Brass addresses why so few of the innovative ideas out of Microsoft’s research labs reach the market:
Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.
Online profile pictures demystified
Normally one wouldn’t expect a dating website to offer detailed analysis and insightful commentary on the social interactions of its members, but OkCupid’s weblog OkTrends is doing just that. Take for example this fascinating article on the four big myths of profile pictures – did you know that for men the effectiveness of showing their abs in their profile pics decreases with age, whereas for women showing some cleavage has an increasingly positive effect with age?
Related: Dating tips from Computer Scientists
Facebook releases their HipHop for PHP compiler:
With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page.
According to the blog post it should be up on GitHub sometime soon, but i haven’t found it yet.