An article on how to choose colours procedurally.
NiDIUM is a new browser engine that throws away CSS and the DOM.
JPG glitch fun! From Georg Fischer. More experiments here.
After Effects Motion Sketch-able particles from Nick Fox-Gieg. Source code available here.
Simulating Watercolour effects in openFrameworks from Kenichi Yoneda aka Kynd.
I’ve just finished reading “Undercover” by Paul Lewis and Rob Evans. It’s terrifying. The lengths that that Special Branch and the British Police went to in order to infiltrate elements of UK society – including allowing undercover officers to form long term relationships with the people they were spying on – all to improve their cover. I can’t recommend the book enough.
Another book I would recommend, for completely different reasons, is “The Pattern on the Stone” by Danny Hillis. It describes the inner workings of computers, from top to bottom. One particular part that stood out for me was thinking about what it means when you send a message to someone physically – you are transporting it in space and time – in four dimensions. Saving also moves a message in four dimensions – three physical dimensions are fixed (discounting the movement of the Earth through the Universe) but time varies.
Danny has set up some very interesting companies – from Thinking Machines, to Applied Proteomics to Applied Minds. The Applied Minds offices sound wonderful – as does their interview technique.
The final of my recent reading Triumvate was “You Are Not A Gadget” by Jaron Lanier. Another firm recommendation – Jaron has some very interesting insights into the reality of all the hype surrounding the ability of artists to make a living online – and the stupidity of crowds (or mobs).
Finally, the Inca didn’t have any money at all. Could we do the same post scarcity?
I remember my first job at UnitedVisualArtists was to make a Quicktime reader for D3. Turns out Quicktime is Turing complete!
The creator of Megaman is making a new game on Kickstarter.
“The Dissent project is a research collaboration between Yale University and UT Austin to create a powerful, practical anonymous group communication system offering strong, provable security guarantees with reasonable efficiency.”
TOR users have doubled in the last month.
Samurai Gunn just looks like a whole heap of fun. In contrast to the usual wealth of weapons and bullets, just a sword and three bullets. iOS multiplayer please? Multi-platform multiplayer?
“Thumbor is a smart imaging service. It enables on-demand crop, resizing and flipping of images.
It also features a VERY smart detection of important points in the image for better cropping and resizing, using state-of-the-art face and feature detection algorithms (more on that in Detection Algorithms).”
Great article by Charles Stross on why the youth of today are the NSA’s nightmare of tomorrow – or now.
I can not wait to see Upstream Color. Even if Shane Carruth can’t spell colour.
The always lovely and talented Seb Lee-Delisle has posted some updates on his work with lasers.
Lauren McCarthy has made a hat that gives you electric shocks if you aren’t smiling.
How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets from the New York Times.
From Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter by Bruce Sterling.
The Wikipedia definition of Umwelt, and xkcd’s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt
Elon Musk has announced his Hyperloop.
A company in London has been tracking peoples mobile phones through sensors hidden in bins.
Instead of trying to emulate older painting techniques, Black Ink has gone completely digital and harnesses a bit of generative magic to allow for new creations that could only be made digitally.
HTML5 rollovers. You can always tell when a web technology is mature.
A brilliant use of mobile phone battery consumption to work out the temperature of a city.
The ever amazing Mike Harrison has posted the above amazing video on acoustic levitation. Mike’s business is called White Wing Logic – he’s done consulting work for companies like UnitedVisualArtists, Cinimod Studio and Jason Bruges Studio.
How to make a Procedural City in 100 lines of code – from Jerome Etienne, based on code by the ever awesome Mr. Doob.
A recent trip to London Zoo left me fascinated by the processes behind coral formation. My old favourite, Cellular Automata are perfect for the job. Horrible enclosures for the Gorillas though.
Not Cart Analysis – Kart Analysis!
Dave Pacheco posted a fascinating article on how he analysed many hours of Mario Kart 64 playing at his office to gain some insight into such a classic game.
The most interesting thing for me wasn’t the subject matter, but rather the thought of doing large scale Computer Vision based analysis in the cloud.
In the new BBC News 24 countdown video that they use on the hour, half hour and quarter hour, I noticed an email to an strange address – “Quickfire”. What is Quickfire? Turns out it’s an application made by a company called Media219 Ltd:
“Media219 was involved in producing the flagship BBC Quickfire application for filing and displaying text from mobile devices.
News is filed via email or text and the system enables much of the information to go live with little or no production process.
It was used very successfully during the Chilean Miner’s Rescue and provided depth to the story that would not have been achieved otherwise.”
Meta seems to be the augmented reality company that many people think Google Glass is. Space Glasses are available for pre order now.
Via Barry Threw – the amazing Funk Logic make the perfect studio gear to impress people with – lots of knobs and buttons, but no actual effect.
Gödel is awesome – part of a wider essay about Gödel for startups.
“Any … formal system capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete”
Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter.
I found “Von Libre” from Loren Carpenter after watching “The Pixar Story“. I love how everyone was recruited in such a relaxed way. Who is the Pixar of today?
Her is from the always interesting Spike Jonze – I remember seeing his photographs back in the 90’s in the best magazine of all time, Grand Royal.
Robert Reich on the problem of inequality, and how to speak truth to power.
Only God Forgives is upcoming from the director of Drive – Nicholas Refn.
Omni, the classic SF magazine, has been rebooted. Arc is a peer – from the makers of New Scientist.