The Inside Story Of Pong - On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here's how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today's tech moguls.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Nov 30, 2012 -
18 comments
These days, it's easy to take visualizations of biological molecules for granted, what with the
easy availability of an ever-increasing supply of high-resolution
X-ray and neutron crystallography data, as well as
freely available software that render them into beautiful and useful images that help us understand how life works. The lack of computers and computer networks in the mid-1950s made creating these illustrations a painstaking collaboration, requiring an artist's craftsmanship and aesthetic sense, as well as, most importantly, the critical ability to visualize the concepts that scientists wish to communicate. One such scientific artist was
Irving Geis, who painted the first biological macromolecule obtained through X-ray data: an iconic watercolor representation of the structure of sperm whale myoglobin, as seen in the third slide of this
slideshow of selected pieces. His first effort was a
revolutionary work of informatics, including coloring and shading effects that emphasized important structural and functional features of the myoglobin protein, simultaneously moving the less-important aspects into the background, all while stressing simplicity and beauty throughout. The techniques that Geis developed in this and
subsequent works influenced the standards for basic 2D protein visualization that are used today.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 8, 2012 -
6 comments
Prototypes are usually the missing links in the evolution of human technology, the dead-ends of ideas that give way to the refinement of the final physical product. Prototypes aren't just for
Darth Vader. While the legal back and forth between Apple and Samsung continues, a
treasure trove of
prototype designs for Apple devices has been released to the public, showing insights into various design approaches and feature enhancements, including
larger form-factor iPads
with and without
kickstands and
landscape ports and iPhones that
parody the Sony logo, show a different layout for
camera elements, and look remarkably like
fourth-generation models, as far back as 2005. On the other hand, some have made prototypes into the end goal itself, such as the folks at
Dangerous Prototypes, a site which features a new open-source electronic hardware
project each month. Some are just
gratuitous fun, while others are a bit more practical, such as one project that
recycles old Nokia displays and another that provides access to
infrared signal, useful for hacking together remote controls for all sorts of IR-based devices. Other prototypes of
tomorrow's technology are less concerned with shrinking down the guts of the invention itself, to make it disappear, but rather on
how we
interact with and
integrate physical representations of these ideas into our daily lives. Above all else, prototypes are always forward-looking and are therefore inherently optimistic expressions of human creativity: Even
children are getting into imagining the world of tomorrow.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 1, 2012 -
14 comments
In
The Geographic Flow of Music (
arxiv), researchers Conrad Lee and Pádraig Cunningham propose a method to use data from the
last.fm API to track the world's listening habits by location and time, showing where shifts in musical tastes have originated and subsequently migrated. Results show music trends originating in smaller cities and flowing outward in unexpected ways, contradicting some assumptions in social science about larger cities being more efficient engines of (cultural) invention.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Apr 26, 2012 -
13 comments
Security researchers at North Carolina State University led by Xuxian Jiang (who had previously discovered
12 malicious Android applications sold through Google's Android Market) have
uncovered holes in how the permissions-based security model is enforced on numerous Android devices. Called "leaks", these vulnerabilities allow new and existing malicious applications to eavesdrop on calls, track the user's location, install applications, send SMS messages, delete data from the device, and more. (
via)
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Dec 5, 2011 -
30 comments
OpenCPU provides a
RESTful interface to the popular open-source statistical package
R, enabling the user to perform calculations and create publication-quality or web-embeddable visualizations via standard web requests.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Nov 10, 2011 -
17 comments
The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2010 - "Researchers are generating mind-boggling volumes of data at exponentially increasing rates. The ability to process that information and display it in ways that enhance understanding is an increasingly important aspect of the way scientists communicate with each other and—especially—with students and the general public. That's why, for the past 8 years, Science and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) have co-sponsored annual challenges to promote cutting-edge efforts to visualize scientific data, principles, and ideas.
This year's awardees span scales from nanoparticles to colliding galaxies, and from microseconds to millennia."
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Feb 19, 2011 -
9 comments
A year before his passing at the age of 102,
LSD discoverer
Albert Hofmann pens a letter to Apple CEO
Steve Jobs (who had remarked publicly about his own use of the hallucinogenic as a creative factor)
asking for Jobs' support for further research into the use of LSD in psychotherapy. In the remainder of the article, Ryan Grim
touches briefly on the use of LSD by scientists and computer programmers who have transformed the world through novel discoveries and inventions.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Jul 9, 2009 -
64 comments
