Happy Island Updates

"A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a..."

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:00:00 -1000

“A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space. The idea of a space elevator — passengers and cargo traveling up and down a 60,000-mile cable — has long been a fixture of science fiction, notably in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “The Fountains of Paradise.””

- Winner in Contest Involving Space Elevator - NYTimes.com

"Dr. Ozcan’s devices are compact in part because they have eliminated the central element in a..."

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:11:50 -1000

“Dr. Ozcan’s devices are compact in part because they have eliminated the central element in a microscope — its lenses — said David J. Brady, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University and director of its Imaging and Spectroscopy Program. “There’s no need for lenses in these devices because the magnification can be done electronically,” he said. “You don’t need optics at all.” For this electronic system of magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cellphone shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phone’s camera chip. Some of the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells and interfering with the other light waves. “When the waves interfere,” Dr. Brady said, “they create a pattern called a hologram.” The detector in the camera records that hologram or interference pattern as a series of pixels.”

- Novelties - How an Engineer Turned a Cellphone Into a Microscope - NYTimes.com

MSG Chamfer Fun

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 05:22:03 -1000

MSG Chamfer Fun:

Working on some new MSG source processing effects. A new halftoning algorithm in this particular case based on MSG chamfer processing in Studio Artist 4.

zz3

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:16:00 -1000

zz3

Most Abstract Festival in the World

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:07:16 -1000

Most Abstract Festival in the World:

Thought people might be interested in this so i’m passing the information along.

The second edition of Punto y Raya (Dot & Line), which has earned the title of “most abstract festival in the…

Visual Focus

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:28:29 -1000

Visual Focus:

The interesting twist in this Studio Artist rendition is that the detail drawing for the facial features was all done automatically with no manual intervention or manual selection. From a…

z1

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:42:23 -1000

nice nasa satellite shot of hawaii

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:33:10 -1000

nice nasa satellite shot of hawaii

"The goal here is to make this so cheap that sequencing a person’s genome could be routine. A..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:24:16 -1000

“The goal here is to make this so cheap that sequencing a person’s genome could be routine. A big step in that direction may have been taken by a company called Complete Genomics, which describes the methods it used to sequence three human genomes in a paper that will be released by Science today. The system described in the paper combines some clever variants of well known molecular biology techniques to read massive amounts of DNA fragments that are, in total, about 65 bases long. But, because the materials used for the reactions are so common, even the enzymes can be purchased cheaply. That allows Complete Genomics to bring an entire human genome in while spending less than $5,000 on materials. All that, plus an error rate of less than one base in 100,000. For comparison, the completion of Jim Watson’s genome, done just a few years ago, is estimated to have cost $20 million.”

- Complete Genomics produces a cheap—well, $5,000—human genome - Ars Technica

new oceanfront property available for sale…

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:21:05 -1000

new oceanfront property available for sale…

"His prototype, and the software that powers it, works with smartphones and turns walls, sheets of..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:46:59 -1000

“His prototype, and the software that powers it, works with smartphones and turns walls, sheets of paper and other surfaces into screens for, say, browsing the Web. The camera translates gestures into commands -– for example, you can hold up both your hands to frame a scene and flick your thumb to take a picture.”

- Adding a Sixth Sense to Your Cellphone - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Childlike Scribble

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:17:49 -1000

Childlike Scribble:

Machine intelligence reaches the level of childlike scribbling. More gallery show output from Studio Artist 4.

z12

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:41:56 -1000

z12

Gallery Show Sketch

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:39:41 -1000

Gallery Show Sketch:

Still working on extending the sketch functionality in Studio Artist 4 gallery show. Added some new path gen functionality from ip ops as well.

"Activity in the brain comes and goes in waves, cycling between high and low activity states...."

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:31:31 -1000

“Activity in the brain comes and goes in waves, cycling between high and low activity states. Researchers have been recording brain waves for more than 100 years and although they think they play roles in working memory, decision-making and communication among brain regions, no one is sure of their exact role in brain function. This work suggests a new role for brain waves - one in which they are directly involved in the brain’s processing. Picower Institute postdoctoral associate and co-author Timothy J. Buschman found that the spotlight of the mind’s eye shifted focus at 25 times a second and that this process of switching was regulated by brain waves. “This is one of the first examples of how brain waves play a specific role in cognitive computations,” Buschman said”

- MIT researchers: The mind’s eye scans like a spotlight

Gallery Show

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:55:13 -1000

Gallery Show:

Gallery Show is a new feature available in Studio Artist 4. You can use it in many different ways. The basic idea behind gallery show was to provide a way to put together customized…

Algorithmic Drawing 4

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:32:26 -1000

Algorithmic Drawing 4:

More algorithmic drawing experiments in Studio Artist 4. I’m using vector drawing paint synthesizer output here.

Vectorizer Gallery Show 2

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:05:58 -1000

Vectorizer Gallery Show 2:

Another random vectorizer gallery show image from Studio Artist 4.

"A recurring theme in biomimetic technology is that, pretty much whatever device we design, something..."

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:39:20 -1000

“A recurring theme in biomimetic technology is that, pretty much whatever device we design, something in nature outperforms it in some way. This view has been reinforced with a recent Nature Photonics paper that takes a look at the optical performance of a Stomatopod crustacean’s eye.”

- A crustacean eye that rivals the best optical equipment - Ars Technica

Vectorizer Gallery Show

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:54:20 -1000

Vectorizer Gallery Show:

One of the new gallery show features in Studio Artist 4 lets you automatically generate random vectorizer presets as a part of the show run. There’s a lot of cool vectorizer abstraction…