Bits and pieces

It’s really easy to make designs like this with the Fractal4D tool.

Songs You Used To Love

The title says it all. They’re songs that you’ll hear and realize you listened to back in the day. For example, the most recent two are Queen - We Are The Champions and Vertical Horizon - Everything You Want.

But what I’m loving even more is the Copy Cats music blog. It’s a blog completely and exclusively devoted to covers and remixes of songs. I’m currently loving Damien Rice’s cover of Creep. The theme of the blog seems to be “hit or miss,” as some of these songs are just terrible. But I still really appreciate hearing artists take old classics and spin them in different ways. The downtempo cover of Danger Zone is unexpected, and yet it still works.

This Wired article on some really recent research at MIT blew me away. This stuff was so good, they were invited to TED to give a talk. Basically, the device takes a bit of the interactivity and conveniently placed information so pervasive on the internet and brings it to the physical world. There’s this video of a graduate student demoing the product in a bunch of situations. For example, he’s walking around a bookstore browsing for books. When he sees one he likes, he removes it from the shelf and holds it in front of him to let the device scan the book’s title. Then when the device is done scanning, it projects a display onto the book cover with the rating the book has gotten from Amazon.com users and perhaps even some choice reviews. And then the guy flips to a random page in the book that has a portrait, and the device picks up on this and starts giving a description of who this figure is.

This kind of reminds me of the audio tours in museums. For those unfamiliar with how that works, you basically rent a headset, and as you walk around, certain exhibits will have numbers next to them. The point is that when you input these numbers into your headset, you’ll get a more thorough description of the exhibit. This is that and so much more.

Another interesting idea is bringing hand gestures into play. You can take a picture by making a picture frame with your fingers and thumbs, and then back at home, you can browse your photo collection on your wall, tweaking them at will. To be honest, this feature is similar to prior multi-touch screen features, but what makes this different is the sheer convenience of it. Instead of buying a relatively stationary surface, you can carry around a small device, and operate on any blank wall or even flat surface.

Then, what I found most impressive was being able to look at a plane ticket and having real time data on delays and gate changes pop up. I can see this being a killer feature, especially for businessmen who go where their companies tell them to. I bet this ability alone will be well worth the cost for company men and jet setters alike.

Right now, this is all enabled by a cameraphone hanging on a lanyard, along with four different colors of marker caps to help the software better distinguish between different fingers. It’s still a bit primitive and hacky, but keep in mind that they’ve only been working on this for four months. I’m excited to see what they’ll come out with in a year or two. Perhaps the technology practiced in Minority Report is not actually so far away.

A question straight from my Schubert to Debussy Final:

You are an intense and high emotional young disciple of Richard Wagner.  Your blood boils with Romantic fervor! The Master’s wonderful new opera “Die Walkure” is about to be performed in your local opera house. You are in a state of elation; however some of your friends are less than enthusiastic. You realize that you must create a pamphlet that will convince everyone to attend. After all it is rumored that The Master will deign to attend! Alas, you are very poor, so you must limit yourself to a single page.

More than just fancy footwork, this ball handling is amazing. It’s awesome if it’s real.

And if you haven’t seen it, Remi Gaillard, urban prankster, does some great things with soccer balls too.