Daily

Go Faster

2010-03-04T19:52:00Z

When people speak of the good old days of racing, you really shouldn't take it as an exaggeration. The racing was fast, dangerous, and not clogged with sponsors just looking to get air time on TV. Yes, big name brands are what funded these teams, but there was a sense of pride in what the car looked like in the end. And while some of todays cars do a good job of livery design, "it just aint what it used to be..."

This video discusses a new book showcasing race car graphic design in the glory days of Le Mans, IMSA, and Formula one. Enjoy.

2010 Olympic Medals.

2010-02-19T06:48:18Z

If you have been following the winter games, you have most certainly seen one of these guys being hung on the necks of the athletes. As part of Vancouver's drive for a "Sustainable Olympics", this years medals were designed and manufactured by local designers and use recycled computer components as a material supplier.

The future.

2010-02-16T09:57:08Z

It takes great film makers close to two hours to say what this commercial says in one minute.

Super Bowl

2010-02-08T05:26:43Z

Some how the best commercial of the super bowl, for me, goes to an unlikely candidate... Google.

Technology and Imbeciles

2010-02-06T16:30:05Z

In science, the weight of the references that one can cite helps to enforce the strength of one's point. In particular, the idea is to find the oldest valid accounts that resonate with the theme. THerefore it's quite funny to read an account of how Mark Twain thought that the appearance of the telephone would produce a nation of idiots. His inimitable recounting of the first conversation he heard as an aural observer meshes well with the feeling we have today when confronted with someone on an ear-bud phone, apparently talking to himself.

Going back further, Socrates was convinced that the advent of writing would doom the world to a state of inarticulate analytical paralysis. Debate, in his view, was key to honing an argument and therefore writing about one's own thoughts was no more than self-indulgent nonsense.

So, the current chest-beating pronouncements about Twittering Twits and Google-eyed morons is nothing new. The "resolution" is not new either. If a technology serves a productive purpose, it will survive and if it doesn't, it won't. Personally, I think Twitter has the makings of a fad and certainly would not have emerged except by piggybacking on the spread of hand-held, multifunction phones. Texting, in general, is a more useful utility and is probably here to stay.

It's all about knowing when to unplug. Recent fMRI studies show that students who think that they are master multi-taskers have not, indeed, undergone some sudden evolutionary spurt that separates them from previous generations. Conscious focus can really only land on one input stream at a time and there is no way around it. If you add too much noise into the input, nothing coherent will stick (like actually learning anything in a class lecture). And Socrates was certainly right in the sense that we humans need to talk to other humans (preferably face-to-face) in order to really grow in the way we view the world.

Is Fusion just too danged complex?

2010-01-30T17:11:08Z

The prospect of fusion power is as old as the H-bomb. We all rejoice that the hydrogen bomb has never been used in warfare, but its swords-into-plowshares brother has not yet produced a watt of power. Laser fusion is as complex as it comes. It makes uranium fuel reactors look simple by comparison. It is remarkable that the technology is now poised (maybe) at the point of making more power than it consumes. The preparation of the fuel is complex, the lasers are very fragile, and the idea of replicating one of these beasts for commercial power production is just crazy. The design is too complex! By comparison, a wind turbine is a motor with a blade on it! I am sure that there are people sitting around wondering, "how are we going to top the large hadron collider?" The answer: you're not. We have to face the fact that there are limits to technical complexity that can be supported even when there is global participation. I'm no Luddite, but we don't get extra credit by making the solution to a problem extra complex.

Loving and Loathing Bots

2010-01-22T21:08:22Z

Vaughn, the irrepressible architect of "Mind Hacks" has a pretty funny series of his "to the bunkers!" links to news about robots (every other URL). Vaughn is actually a clinical psychologist and so this is all tongue-in-cheek...on his part at least. I never cease to marvel at the horrible prognostic capabilities in this domain. Yes...there is a link to the "sex bot" shown below (don't get excited, it's tame).

COCO

2010-01-21T06:29:13Z

So Conan leaving NBC over his proposed move to after midnight has allowed for some pretty crazy shenanigans to come out of the writing staff. This one in particular really got me...

Seriously, if you are not watching Conan this week, or at least checking out the funny bits online, you are missing some of the best comedic television in recent history.

You can check out those "funny bits" at Gawker.tv.

Designer Meat

2010-01-17T14:55:01Z

One doesn't have to be an uninformed extremist to worry about the practice of raising large herd animals for food. Old style cattle and hog farming does create sustainability issues. So, it's pretty exciting to see work on making pork in a petri dish. I know that this sounds icky, but down where I live stores carry pork brains in milk gravy...in a can! The great challenge is scaling up (this would be a bioreactor sort of affair) and dealing with the taste and texture issues. But, wait a minute, does salami taste like any animal meat you know? People eat tofu, for god's sake! I think that there are initial approaches that would still knock the pants off of Spam, even if the perfect vat-grown pork chop remains in the future.

Canner Valley?

2010-01-10T14:22:28Z

This link goes to the MIT summary of robotic tricks from 2009. For those of you who remember the "canners" in the movie I Robot there was indeed a lot of effort made to give Sonny life-like expressions (in reality these were supplied by a human actor). I'm not convinced that this effort is really going anywhere. Perhaps instead they can teach workers at the DMV to have human-like facial expressions...