Oculus FPV: flying into the age of first-person drone videos

Demonstration of a quadcopter outfitted with stereoscopic cameras that have been attuned to respond to head rotation from Oculus Rift 3D goggles. Documentation on Github:
https://github.com/Matsemann/oculus-fpv

I discovered this through Marc Andreessen, though plenty of other folks found this video through science fiction author William Gibson. This is the sort of thing he wrote about decades ago. Now we're living in that future.

I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more "first-person-flier" videos recorded using personal drones in the one that's just around the corner.

Find me @ digiphile.wordpress.com

If you happen to find your way here, you'll notice I haven't updated this blog much.

That's because I was either;

A) Blogging, writing definitions, podcasting or otherwise editing content for WhatIs.com

B) I was tweeting at @digiphile.

I did that a lot in 2008.

I've moved over to digiphile at Wordpress.com in 2009 and don't plan on updating this blog again.

Please update your feeds, bookmarks and links accordingly.

Cheers!

-Alex

Packaging FAIL

My very first personally constructed FAIL, thrown askew into the wilds of teh interwebs.

New embeddable widget from Hulu.com makes sharing shows & movies a snap.

Hulu.com continues to kick ass. Hulu allowed me watch all of Firefly over the holiday break from the comfort of my parents' guestroom, saving me from the horror of their cable-less househould (Disclaimer: I don't have cable at home either, actually).

Now they're offering embeds. Here's the Daily Show:



I'm not sure, exactly, why you'd want to watch here instead of on the main site. I'm not going to worry about it; this is one more step towards a more accessible form of ad-supported online TV. Hurrah.

Enjoy some Family Guy:

Dancing on YouTube is another "feelgood" online moment

Story about WhereTheHellIsMatt via A Private Dance? Four Million Web Fans Say No from Charles McGrath of the New York Times.

All in all, I vastly prefer the warm and fuzzy Internet memes much more than the excremental instances.

Sunset on Mars

Thanks to NASA for posting this pic of sunset on Mars as part of their image of the day series.

(Hat tip to Laughing Squid via Boing Boing)

Video from the BBC: Flying penguins reported in the Antarctic

This one premiered on April 1st, so the natural assumptions about its veracity apply.

It upholds the longstanding (and inspiring) tradition of grand hoaxes from the BBC.

Have I mentioned how much I love the i09 blog recently?

Apparently I've been blogslacking. Shocking. A friend pointed out that I share posts from a io9 on my linkblog quite frequently..

Guilty as charged.

I love this blog.

Posts like their Complete Guide to Science Fiction Season just make my life easier and more deeply enriched with the scifi goodness I've known and loved for the past two decades.

Tron, Sweded

My friend Snarles IM'ed me this link to Wired's Underwire blog with a video of a Sweded version of Tron embedded.

I'd watched it earlier this week but watching it again reminded me that I really should have posted it.

Geektastic. I enjoyed Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind much more than I expected to, given the New Yorker's tepid review. The website for the film, BeKindMovie.com has a similar quirky aesthetic. You can see Google sweded there, along with this helpful guide to sweding.

The future Eiffel Tower -- another reason to visit Paris again

The temporary observation deck will be made of carbon Kevlar webbing and be bolted to the existing tower, doubling the area at the available to sightseers.

Neat.

[Hat tip: iO9]

ping.fm, Tumblr, FriendFeed and getting microbloggy with it

I've been twittering much more recently, in no small part due to downloading Snitter.

The latter is a brilliant interface for Twitter.

As a result of that network, I've been turned exposed to any number of new (and exciting) social media services. Each service has made its mark by allowing the user to aggregate and mix multiple feeds from blogs, podcasts, photo services and video networks.

ping.fm, which allows the user to update multiple presence applications at once, just makes my life easier. Many thanks to Chris Brogan for the invite.

I'm trying out Tumblr, after getting tumblr envy one too many times.

Joining FriendFeed has allowed me to aggregate them all together and to subscribe to and comment upon other blogger's shared feeds.

I'm uncertain whether adding more services will save me time in the end or add needed precision to winnowing the important bits and bytes from each day's information glut.

I was impressed with the ease of sign in. Online interface design has come a long way in the past ten years. 

Cyberdonkey: "Big Dog" Robot from Boston Dynamics

Big Dog has been all over the Internet today. How can it not be?

The unearthly gait, buzzing operation and weirdly mammalian bounding of Big Dog are even more impressive in this outing with a payload and snowy hills to navigate.


Boston Dynamics and DARPA are well on their way to giving Skynet a hardy pet someday.

Playmobil Security Checkpoint. No, really.

My friend Dana forwarded me a link to the comment page on Amazon.com listing for the Playmobil Security Checkpoint today.

That comment section is about as entertaining as anything I've read this month. Hilarious.

There are one or two serious comments about using the product to teach kids about security procedures before heading to the airport. {chuckle}

The laughs kept coming, though... guess what "Customers Who Bought Items Like This Also Bought?"

Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science by L. Ron Hubbard
Scientology: A New Slant On Life by L. Ron Hubbard
Clear Body, Clear Mind: The Effective Purification by L. Ron Hubbard
Self Analysis by L. Ron Hubbard
Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought by L. Ron Hubbard

From this, we can gather that Scientologists love to play with plasticine security checkpoints.

I love Fridays.

Hexapus!

Hi, Henry.

[Image courtesy of AFP/HO/Blackpool Sealife Centre]

History's Greatest Replies, according to Dr. Mardy

This compilation is just priceless.

Some classics:

"Winston, if you were my husband, I'd put poison in your coffee."
-Lady Astor

"Nancy, if you were my wife, I'd drink it."
-Winston Churchill

****

"What are you doing reading a Bible?" asked an astonished Thomas Mitchell, confronted by an irreligious man paging through the Good Book on his deathbed.

"I'm looking for loopholes."
-W. C. Fields

****

At a press conference, a reporter pointed out that $80,000 was $5,000 more than President Hoover's annual salary.

"Maybe so, but I had a better year than he did."
-Babe Ruth

BoingBoingTV: "Food Fight" -- an abridged history of war through food

Filmmaker Stefan Nadelman's stop-animation piece provides an abridged history of war (WWII-Gulf War II) told through the foods of the countries in conflict.

Funny, sad and in no way appetite inspiring, at least on this day. Brilliant in its own way.

[Hat tip to Jon Battelle]

John Cleese's Letter to America

Cleese is still one of the funniest men on the planet.

His letter to America is wonderfully droll, witty and more than a little damning.

Need a laugh?

Go read it.

A paper in Nature disputes the significance of the KT boundary event:

I've been loving the combined ScienceBlogs feed over the past few weeks.

Along with the new io9 blog, these feeds continue to feed a longstanding love for both science and science fiction.

Take together, they provide a great mix of what is and what could be.

Today's reading brought me to to Greg Laden's blog, where he comments at length on a new paper published in Nature that disputes importance of the KT Boundary Event in mammalian evolution. (See the abstract for The delayed rise of present-day mammals for more; full access requires registration or a trip to the (gasp) library.)

As Laden says:

The KT boundary event is the moment in time when a ca. 10 km. diameter object going very fast hit the earth in the vicinity of the modern Yucatan, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs (and almost everything else larger than a microwave). It has been suggested that this event resulted in (allowed for) the subsequent diversification of the mammals, presumably because the earlier extinction event opened up previously filled niches, into which the mammals evolved, and possibly because of dramatic climate change that occurred with this event.

One of the reasons that this study is important is that it seems to falsify this long-standing hypothesis.

This paper is thoughtfully discussed on Pharyngula and Sandwalk, and I recommend that you have a look at those sites.

I suspect some of my more geologically-inclined friends will find this interesting as well. I'm glad to see that our understanding of evolutionary history continues to, well, evolve, based upon new research.

eTrade's baby/clown commercial is still making me laugh whenever I see it

Never underestimate the creepiness of clowns.

Eric Schulman's "Wiki history of the universe in 200 words or less"

Brilliant. From the Science Creative Quarterly:

Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Deuterium and helium production. Density perturbations. Recombination. Blackbody radiation. Local contraction. Cluster formation. Reionization? Violent relaxation. Virialization. Biased galaxy formation? Turbulent fragmentation. Contraction. Ionization. Compression. Opaque hydrogen. Massive star formation. Deuterium ignition. Hydrogen fusion. Hydrogen depletion. Core contraction. Envelope expansion. Helium fusion. Carbon, oxygen, and silicon fusion. Iron production. Implosion. Supernova explosion. Metals injection. Star formation. Supernova explosions. Star formation. Condensation. Planetesimal accretion. Planetary differentiation. Crust solidification. Volatile gas expulsion. Water condensation. Water dissociation. Ozone production. Ultraviolet absorption. Photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Oxidation. Mutation. Natural selection and evolution. Respiration. Cell differentiation. Sexual reproduction. Fossilization. Land exploration. Dinosaur extinction. Mammal expansion. Glaciation. Homo sapiens manifestation. Animal domestication. Food surplus production. Civilization! Innovation. Exploration. Religion. Warring nations. Empire creation and destruction. Exploration. Colonization. Taxation without representation. Revolution. Constitution. Election. Expansion. Industrialization. Rebellion. Emancipation Proclamation. Invention. Mass production. Urbanization. Immigration. World conflagration. League of Nations. Suffrage extension. Depression. World conflagration. Fission explosions. United Nations. Space exploration. Assassinations. Lunar excursions. Resignation. Computerization. World Trade Organization. Terrorism. Internet expansion. Reunification. Dissolution. World-Wide Web creation. Composition. Extrapolation?