Isaac.im: Geek

“I don’t want you to die,” said Vincent.

The words didn’t actually transfer as sound to any part of my ear. They were signals which ran from a dermal connection on Vincent’s body, through my hand, and up into my brain where they were interpreted by my cerebral cortex with the help of a nano-sized mechanism called a Xybot.

“So what,” I said. I actually spoke these words but Vincent understood. He just had his own way of communicating because he didn’t have a mouth. He was a gun. A Black Widow Class V made by the Demiyan Corporation. The shiny silver of his body turned a tint of green. A trick he often used to convey his mellow mood. He was only supposed to use it for camouflage, but Vincent loved melodrama.

via 365 tomorrows » Quisnam est Dominus : A New Free Flash Fiction SciFi Story Every Day.

It’s stories like this that make me read this site every day. They’re very short, maybe a minute or two of reading every day, and not always great; but sometimes they’re really very good, like this one. A new story every day, seven days a week.

Let’s put it this way: The project was originally supposed to only go 365 days – one year – but it was so successful that they haven’t stopped.

The First Digital Image - click for more info

More than 50 years ago, Kirsch took a picture of his infant son and scanned it into a computer. It was the first digital image: a grainy, black-and-white baby picture that literally changed the way we view the world. With it, the smoothness of images captured on film was shattered to bits.

via Square Pixel Inventor Tries to Smooth Things Out | Wired Science | Wired.com.

I like pixels; I like dealing with them. But mostly because I usually don’t feel constrained by them – design has moved beyond that point, for the most part.

I feel like we’re just now getting past the point where pixels matter – just now, a little more than fifty years after the first digital image was produced. For decades, every pixel had to count.

I remember playing video games with fonts that were artfully produced – beautiful shapes, but as few pixels as possible so a paragraph might fit on a screen instead of a few words. Nowadays, we’re getting high resolution displays where we’re still worried about anti-aliasing, but no longer are we making every pixel count for simple readability – a modern monitor can display a surprising amount of legible text.

It was a grainy image of a baby—just 5 centimeters by 5 centimeters—but it turned out to be the well from which satellite imaging, CAT scans, bar codes on packaging, desktop publishing, digital photography and a host of other imaging technologies sprang.

SEAC (Standards Electronic/Eastern Automatic Computer) - click for more information

It was 50 years ago this spring that National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST) computer pioneer Russell Kirsch asked “What would happen if computers could look at pictures?” and helped start a revolution in information technology. Kirsch and his colleagues at NBS, who had developed the nation’s first programmable computer, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), created a rotating drum scanner and programming that allowed images to be fed into it. The first image scanned was a head-and-shoulders shot of Kirsch’s three-month-old son Walden.

National Bureau of Standards (NBS) researcher R.B. Thomas shown operating the SEAC scanner

The ghostlike black-and-white photo only measured 176 pixels on a side—a far cry from today’s megapixel digital snapshots—but it would become the Adam and Eve for all computer imaging to follow. In 2003, the editors of Life magazine honored Kirsch’s image by naming it one of “the 100 photographs that changed the world.”

Kirsch and his wife Joan, an art historian, now reside in Oregon. Together, they use computers to analyze paintings and define the artistic processes by which they were created. Son Walden—whose face helped launch the era of computerized photography—works in communications for Intel following a successful career as a television news reporter. (source)

After decades of square pixels, Kirsch has decided to try and change things:

Now retired and living in Portland, Oregon, Kirsch recently set out to make amends. Inspired by the mosaic builders of antiquity who constructed scenes of stunning detail with bits of tile, Kirsch has written a program that turns the chunky, clunky squares of a digital image into a smoother picture made of variably shaped pixels.

Click here to read more from Wired.com.

Even wondered what happened to your favorite spacecraft from some old sci-fi series?

I’m not talking Star Trek or Star Wars, but some other classics.

Well, apparently you missed the Sci-Fi Air Show. But it’s okay, you can go see pictures:

Sci-Fi Air Show website

The ZARM facility's drop tower.

Einstein was famous for performing what are termed “thought experiments”—hypothetical situations that illustrate the consequences of a theory—that allowed him to gain insights into the natural world without bothering to leave the confines of his own brain. One of these experiments involved placing a subject in an elevator that is then allowed to free fall. As far as Einstein could tell, there would be no way for the subject to tell if she was falling into the local gravity well, or simply out in space, free from gravity’s influence—this insight supposedly helped him formulate his theory of relativity.

But it turns out that this is the sort of thought experiment that might be useful to translate to reality, since building a laboratory equivalent of an elevator shaft is a whole lot easier than sending something into space. But the sorts of physics experiments we’d like to do tend to involve large, complex, and delicate equipment that wouldn’t take well to being dropped down an elevator shaft. In an impressive bit of engineering, researchers in Germany have created a device that produces and monitors a Bose-Einstein condensate while being dropped down a 146 meter high shaft.

via Dropping an Einstein thought experiment down an elevator shaft.

Weightlessness inside a Reduced gravity aircraft

Okay, this is pretty sweet. And I wonder if the idea could be scaled up for astronaut training. Currently, astronauts train on aircraft that fly paths making ellipses if viewed from the side. For around 25 seconds at a time, this produces a period of apparent/relative weightlessness.

From Wikipedia:

The aircraft achieves weightlessness by following an elliptic flight path relative to the center of the Earth.^[3] While following this path, the aircraft and its payload are in free fall and are literally orbiting the earth. During this time the aircraft does not exert any g-forces on its contents.

"Vomit Comet" flight path

Initially the aircraft climbs with a pitch angle of 45 degrees. Weightlessness is achieved by reducing thrust and lowering the nose to maintain a zero-lift angle of attack. Weightlessness begins while ascending and lasts all the way “up-and-over the hump”, until the craft reaches a declined angle of 30 degrees. At this point, the craft is pointed downward at high speed, and must begin to pull back into the nose-up attitude to repeat the maneuver. The forces are then roughly twice that of gravity on the way down, at the bottom, and up again. This lasts all the way until the aircraft is again halfway up its upward trajectory, and the pilot again initiates the zero-g flight path.^[4]

In general, this aircraft is used to train astronauts in zero-g maneuvers, giving them about 25 seconds of weightlessness out of 65 seconds of flight. In about two thirds of cases,^[5] this motion produces nausea due to airsickness, especially in novices, giving the plane its nickname.

For theme developers and site administrators, WordPress 3.0 has a number of enhancements. The new MU integration is a big plus if you’re running a blog network, or even two different sites that share resources and authors

via Webmonkey – The Web Developer’s Resource | Wired.com.

I thought a good first post from my first test of the integrated MU functionality would be the post on Webmonkey that caused me to upgrade.