Wall Of Cool

What can I say, legos are cool

An amazing example of how fast information spreads in the real-time internet age.
The Lessons:
Wikipedia is Faster than Google
CNN is slower than TMZ
Twitter is *Very* fast... until it overloads.

The entire Michael Jackson estate for auction.  An incredible art collection, although, my favorite stuff is from book VII, "Memorabilia From the Life and Career of Michael Jackson"

Telsa making electric cars cool
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/23/tesla.electric.cars/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

The longest lasting, fasting charging, most environmentally stable battery on the market... and with the help of a little federal stimulus money (within the next few weeks?) Boston Power will be recycling 'slack' (abandoned) US auto manufacturing infrastructure to create high-tech jobs to boot! 
Note: 3.5 year-old Boston Power is already manufacturing high volumes in Taiwan and China.

Synapse is on Linkedin

Hello World,
Your Synapse is here.
 

"It is comprised of 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer."
 
Apparently you can pay to spend the night in the field... not sure why you would pay money for your worst night's sleep ever but it looks cool.

This is a great example of some of the latest input technologies for mobile devices.

"Cliff Kushler, the inventor of the T9 keyboard technology for numeric keypads, has developed a new alphanumeric entry technology for touch-screen laptops and Smartphone devices. This latest technology, named Swype, works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard similar to ones found on Windows Mobile and the iPhone. The difference from the usual method of typing in the letters is that a finger or stylus is used to slide in the first letter, then without lifting the finger, the user continues writing the entire word"

"High-tech, life-sciences, and energy innovation may well hold the key to the nation’s economic health and long-term competitiveness... showcase the panorama of transformative efforts underway in such fields as energy, life sciences, robotics, cloud and mobile computing, and transportation—at universities, startups, and large corporations."

Juan Enriquez, Managing Director, Excel Medical Ventures
Dean Kamen, Founder, FIRST, President, DEKA Research & Development
John Abele, Co-founder, Boston Scientific
Yet-Ming Chiang, Professor of Ceramics, MIT, Co-founder A123Systems
Jeff Nick, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, EMC
Christoph Westphal, CEO, Sirtris, SVP, Centre of Excellence for External Drug Discovery, GlaxoSmithKline
Mohamad Ali, Massachusetts Senior State Executive, IBM
John Maraganore, CEO, Alnylam
Reed Sturtevant, Managing Director, Microsoft Startup Labs

Christina Lampe-Onnerud, CEO, Boston-Power
Tillman Gerngross, Co-founder, GlycoFi, Co-founder and CEO, Adimab, Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth
Mick Mountz, CEO and Founder, Kiva Systems
John D. Halamka, Chief Information Officer, CareGroup Health System, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology, Harvard Medical School
Carl Dietrich, CEO, Terrafugia
James Carey, Co-founder and Principal Scientist, SiOnyx
Maria Rupnick, Co-Founder, Zafgen, Instructor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Thomas Hughes, CEO, Zafgen
Noubar Afeyan, Managing Partner and CEO, Flagship Ventures
Michael Greeley, General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners, Chairman, New England Venture Capital Association
Jeffrey Ives, CEO, Satori Pharmaceuticals
Brian Shin, CEO, Visible Measures
Bill Taylor, Co-founder, Fast Company
Jo Tango, Founder and Partner, Kepha Partners

not just an extrasolar planet mind you... WTF!? [-ed.]

"Using a technique called Pixel-lensing, a group of astronomers in Italy may have detected a planet orbiting another star. But this planet is unique among the 300-plus exoplanets discovered so far, as it and its parent star are in another galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy, to be exact. Technically, the star in M31 was found to have a companion about 6 times the mass of Jupiter, so it could be either a brown dwarf or a planet. But either way, this is a remarkable feat, to find an object of that size in another galaxy."

"Pixel-lensing, or gravitational microlensing was developed to look for MAssive Compact Halo Objects MACHOs in the galactic halo of the Milky Way. Because light rays are bent when they pass close to a massive object, the gravity of a nearby star focuses the light from a distant star towards Earth. This method is sensitive to finding planets in our own galaxy, ranging is sizes from Jupiter-like planets to Earth-sized ones. And recently, astronomers used gravitational microlensing to be able to see about a dozen or so stars in M31, an extraordinary accomplishment in itself."

"The team notes in their paper that perhaps an extrasolar planet in M31 might have already been detected since an anomaly in a pixel-lensing light curve was previously reported by another research team in 2004, who claimed that a possible binary system in M31 was responsible for an observed anomaly in an observed light curve."

It is a pretty normal experience to see the 737 bodies arrivingto the Seattle area via rail.
It is another thing to see this big guy flying overhead!

Question came up the other night on how old the PC mouse is. Well it was first demostrated 40 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
Mice now come in many different flavors, but what is next?
Maybe something like this?
http://oblong.com/
 

Everybody needs a hero.

My fav is #20...

Uh oh... the twitter message unique ID on each message is about to roll over.  Will the world shut down?  Will dogs and cats become playmates??  ONLY TIME WILL TELL!

I find this interesting, as it parallels some work that I have been doing:  Nokia is working on harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy.  Very cool.

The Adventure School plugged Synapse on their blog today :-).  Have you heard?  We're hosting Green Drinks tomorrow, Tuesday June 9th?  Come one and all!
For those not already in the know, the Adventure school is an amazing party and event planning business in Seattle.  The Adventure School is run by Cori Ready and Aviva Palmer, two movers and shakers of their time.  Their website is amazingly cool (http://www.theadventureschool.com) and has many more details about thier events.  If you search back far enough, you'll even find a Winter Party that they threw for Synapse back in 2007.  It was a TOTAL BLAST!

(BUSINESS WIRE)--Microsoft’s Bing overtook Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the United States and worldwide Thursday (4th June) according to data from StatCounter Global Stats. StatCounter says that Bing grabbed market share from Google.

“It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.”

StatCounter’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the US Bing leapfrogged Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%. Yahoo! has 10.22%. Google still commands the US search engine market with 71.47%.

StatCounter data globally finds that Bing at 5.62% has taken a narrow lead over Yahoo! (5.13%). Google worldwide retains 87.62% of the market. See http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-daily-20090529-20090604

A bacon ak-47?  Yes please

Jake got me hooked on no knead breads.  Give it a shot.  It's easy and delicious.  But don't try to pick up the pan at 450deg without a pot holder.  It hurts.

This is a great photo essay illustrating some parts of the world we never see.

Crazy Icelanders take their crazy hill climbing jeeps to the water

Who wouldn't want to cruise the hood on one of these...

One of my big complaints in finding good proto vendors and mechnical engineers are people who know how to make things with their hands.

Google is once again changing the way we use the internet.  This looks cool.

This lab sounds awesome.  I totally want a crunchy nitrogen juice pop.
 

I love Core77 on a normal day, but this was a real gem from them. Wind energy designed to go on already existing structures for power lines. Genius!

Someone is obviously thinking of me while making phone apps. I need to meet this Glympse person...

Making the world's knowledge computable Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.

Amazing photo, taken from earth during the Atlantis solar transit last week.

Ph.D. candidate Andreas Ess at ETH in Zurich has developed a convincing demonstration of a camera-based pedestrian tracking system. Check out this video.

In AI, the idea of expert systems - programs which use predefined rules to sort through facts and arrive at a conclusion - gained popularity in the seventies but were later found to be insufficient to tasks involving large quantities of data, as in detecting and tracking objects in video containing millions of pixels per second. In the past ten years, great advances have been made using statistics-based approaches to discriminate and detect such objects, but only recently have rule-based systems been making a comeback in the form of graphical models. Graphical models are a technique for propagating inferences between nodes in a graph, each of which represents a concept to be reasoned about. In this case, we would like to infer the number and 3D position of pedestrians in a video. We use the available data to infer these parameters for each frame in the video: the number and location of each pedestrian from the previous frame, and the output of statistics-based image-processing algorithm run on the current frame. In the near future, I expect to see the scope of these inferences expanding, taking into account and tracking a holistic model of the scene. For example, we should be able to teach the computer that a pedestrian is much more likely to be found walking on a sidewalk than walking 10 feet up in thin air, but we have to model and track the location and appearance of the sidewalk in order to do that. This research will appear in an upcoming issue of PAMI: A. Ess, B. Leibe, K. Schindler, L. Van Gool, "Robust Multi-Person Tracking from a Mobile Platform", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. to appear, 2009.

A computer interface that works by watching your hands play in a tub filled with mud. Yes, by mud I mean wet dirt.

Scientists and computer gurus at the Smithsonian, the University and Maryland and Columbia University are developing an iPhone app that would automatically identify plant species from photos of leaves. The app then would shoot that data up to the Internet, where scientists could access it and use it for research.

I swear I will start adding 'hip' technology content soon. But this is just too funny to resist :-)

I picked up one of these nifty little gadgets a little while ago to aid in photo-note-taking (see https://www.evernote.com/) Then I “happened upon” IkonTools http://www.ikontools.com/articles/eyefi-dissected’ fab tear-down report, which in turn got me thinking about the feasibility of a hack: strap a neodymium magnet to a couple of stacked lithium coin cells to make a (relatively) cheap throwie mesh network. Not for anything nefarious of course, just to see if it could be done. well… Here’s a brief rundown of the major stuff inside:

Atheros WiFi, Samsung 2G Flash, Hyperstone Memory Controller, Adam Dunkel’s IwIP TCP/IP Stack running on eCos. Now, I’m mostly a hardware guy, and this is (obviously) mostly a software hack, unless…there’s some easy method of writing .jpeg files to the card from an external host! Hackaday Webserver on a Credit CardOne way might be to borrow from Hack-a-day’s “web sever on a credit card” project. Take your basic PIC24F, add a little CMOS imager and, voila! instant stop-motion wireless webcam throwie! Of course, throw in a cheap SD datalogger and things could get really interesting…!

Microsoft released a couple of videos recently presenting their vision of the future. These videos seemingly 'normal' objects seamlessly turning into computer interfaces and back into objects. It's clear that these videos are more on the art and fantasy side of the science--->fantasy spectrum, but that is entirely their appeal. When allowed to step out of the box of what we normally believe to be possible, it's easier to stumble on really creative ideas that actually are. http://gizmodo.com/5229869/microsoft-presents-us-with-their-vision-of-th...

My personal wiki, with IT information I've gleaned over the years and links to things I like.