Monday 30 April 2007

An answering machine that could save lives

Reported in todays Sydney Morning Herald is a story about a device:
"..Sydney researchers have created a mobile device that can take an ECG, call an ambulance and a cardiologist."
because "More than two-thirds of Australians would not call an ambulance if they thought they were having a heart attack." and "The device can send the electrocardiogram in real time to heart specialists and if a person experiences chest pain and is unable to call an ambulance the phone also leaves an automated voice message and text message with their cardiologist and any other emergency numbers programmed into it. The device, which is undergoing clinical trials, has the approval of the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. It should be available in the next year or so."
No pics of the device that I can find yet but it may use this new Flexible Battery ?

An Honest Depiction of Sol


This image is at the very bottom of the Blog page, which suggests it could be the Blog Authors First Post. Although my broadband download speed is 512k this page like other Blog Pages such as boingboing, treehugger, theartlife makes my user experience feel like I've suddenly been cut down to 56k added to this the pain increases when I try to scroll down the page and at every mouse click the spinning beach ball makes my outdated G4 feel like a G3 again. I think most of the problem as in the case of boingboing, treehugger and theartlife examples are the physical weight of the embedded Video portals. Whereas Desertsky has a really interestingly different text graphic on the top of the page, the problems I experienced with it are beyond my understanding. When I visit pages like this I do something different.
Once the page has fully loaded I immediately point the mouse at the bottom of the scroll slider window and click to see the bottom of the page (An Honest Dawning of Our Solar System). then scrolling up and/or pulling the slider up most sites at least allow for a frictionless or oily experience baring perhaps, unfortunately, Deasertsky and although Arabic text feels incredibly calm and aesthetic its as remote to me as finding a living thylocene in Tasmania !
Nevertheless Desertsky's graphic of the solar system looks to me as it is one of the best depictions of our Solar system and yet we earthlings have not yet known what name to actually give our Solar System, more so with the recent advent of discovering other Solar Systems, but perhaps someone will say it is in fact named Sol, but is that really the widely accepted view ?

Sunday 29 April 2007

A Simple Way To Connect PC with a Mac


How many of us have wanted to easily move data or links between a pc and a Mac ? Well here it is - synergy: [noun] a mutually advantageous conjunction of distinct elements. This software has been highly sought after for many people and would appear to work seamlessly for both connected platforms.

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all.

The theory behind synergy is simple: the server captures mouse, keyboard, clipboard, and screen saver events and forwards them to one or more clients.

Thursday 19 April 2007

UK Ingenuity Steps Up


"The Jumbo Remote by Innovage presents a solution to several common problems. You can replace all your existing remotes with one easy to use handset - no more cluttering of the coffee table. It's large size also means you are far less likely to lose it! In addition, the large soft-touch buttons make it user friendly - especially for those who are disabled or partially sighted. Manage up to 4 seperate television/audio devices at once. Programmable power OFF timer Code search button discovers device and automatically codes it. Compatible with most major brands of AV components. Only requires two AA batteries (not included).

The Innovage Jumbo Universal Remote comes with large soft-touch buttons and enough smarts to control up to four different A/V devices. Not all at once, of course you understand. That would be difficult and perhaps rather noisy".

The Jumbo Remote by Innovage presents a solution to several common problems. You can replace all your existing remotes with one easy to use handset - no more cluttering of the coffee table. It’s large size also means you are far less likely to lose it! In addition, the large soft-touch buttons make it user friendly - especially for those who are disabled or partially sighted. It would be cool if some cell phone manufacturers could see the light. I give 10 points to the maker of this remote for making button fumbling a thing of the past

Woman Gives Birth To Monkey Baby


You'll have to forgive me but I don't know how recent this video is nor do I know if this baby is real, nor do I have the foggiest from which country or language this video is in. The sad thing is we seem to get video footage of a woman walking around on all fours, as it were, inwhich we are led to believe is the mother. The baby appears more so to resemble a puppet or a doll rather then a living entity ?

Monday 16 April 2007

Humble Surveillance ?


"In its short history, video--the medium of surveillance and voyeurism--has been branded an epically controlling technology, breaking the world down into transmittable electric impulses and reassembling it in frigid, penetrating displays. Its ability to reduce experience to the grist of information would seem to shake the foundations of the real. But video appears more humble in new work by Boston-based artist Andrew Neumann, on view through May 12 at Bitforms gallery in Soeul, Korea. For example, in the two-channel work 'Wave/Phase' the artist shows a set of seascapes on four LCD panels. At first glance they could be a bank of security monitors, but mounted on a sheet of unfinished plywood, the alternating views of sea and sky create a check pattern that feels more like a vernacular work of folk art than an ominously surveilled coastline. The exhibition opened with a performance by the artist, who is also well-known as a designer of electronic musical instruments, and its his musician's sense of human-scale tinkering that comes through in the work. While video purports to dematerialize the world, Neumann treats it like material to be played with, simultaneously offering a cheeky parody of more menacing uses of the medium". - Bill Hanley

This work suggests a personal viewing intimacy like reading a book or watching a small array of video ipods and largely because of the scale being small one wonders why the piece even requires a physical space like who is going to Seoul to view this work ?
So why is this work not on google video or you tube the work looks as though it could just as easily be viewed on a home monitor ?

Bend the space time contiuae with these sticks


Drumming Up A Storm

Now any Drummer can bend the space time continum with their ipod
Plug them into your iPod and these motion activated drumsticks allow you to drum along with your favorite songs. Who amongst us hasn't daydreamed of being the drummer in their favorite Rock and Roll band All your drumming dreams can come true for about US$30. Be sure to click the Gallery link herein

Here is an older version of interactive drum sticks, but hey I bet you can't interface these with Garageband ?

Thanks to Professor Francis Everitt


Einstein was right: space and time bend

Ninety years after Albert Einstein expounded his famous theory that " space and time bend " , and largely due to a dogged determination of the Stanford University professor Francis Everitt, a man who has devoted his life to investigating Einstein's theory of relativity has proven with the assistance of a $700m Nasa probe that the universe behaves as Einstein said. Now the race is on to show that the other half of relativity also works...
" According to Einstein, in the same way that a large ball placed on a elasticated cloth stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time. A marble moving along the sagging cloth will be drawn towards the ball, as the Earth is to the Sun, but not fall into it as long as it keeps moving at speed. Gravity, argued Einstein, was not an attractive force between bodies as had been previously thought. ........ The theory explained: When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity in 1915, he found a new way to describe gravity. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had supposed, but a consequence of the distortion of space and time, conceived together in his theory as 'space-time'. Any object distorts the fabric of space-time and the bigger it is, the greater the effect. Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the 'geodetic effect'. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball. Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are travelling. According to the theory, matter and energy distort space-time, curving it around themselves. 'Frame dragging' theoretically occurs when the rotation of a large body 'twists' nearby space and time. It is this second part of Einstein's theory that the Nasa mission has yet to corroborate."

News Link



Wednesday 11 April 2007

Itsalongwaytothetopifyouwanttorockandroll


Korea’s Samsung has recently announced is a larger, faster solid state drive (SSD) that uses flash memory to replace the spinning platters in conventional hard disks.

The new 1.8in SSD is the largest yet from a major manufacturer, coming in at the 64GB mark, which brings the technology ever closer in size to typical HDD territory. The drive uses eight gigabit single-level-cell NAND flash memory chips, which allows it to operate considerably faster than Samsung’s previous-generation 32GB SSD.

Confirming that the 64GB SSD is faster than conventional hard drives, Samsung also noted that its read and write speeds are 20 and 60 per cent faster than the previous model.

After production begins in the second quarter of this year the most likely destination for the new drive is, of course, in high-end rugged laptop computers, which will come at a premium price, but there are other options.

Samsung says SSDs in the 8 to 16GB range will end up in car GPS systems and camcorders, while flash drives with hundreds of gigabytes of storage will eventually be used in servers.

If anyone is wondering why the sudden upsurge in interest in SSDs, Samsung’s footnote shines some light on the reason. The predicted value of the SSD market this year is an insignificant (to them) US$200 million, but that’s set to rise to $6.8 billion by 2010.

Thursday 5 April 2007

Morpho Towers

This Art work (video) was created by Sachio Kodama & Yasushi Miyajima The accompanying Music piece is by Tetsuhide Hidaka. The work was a collaboration with Osamu Sumiya & Megumi Sato.

Morpho Towers--Two Standing Spirals” is an installation that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that moves synthetically to music. The two spiral towers stand on a large plate that hold ferrofluid. When the music starts, the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened. Spikes of ferrofluid are born from the bottom plate and move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the iron spiral.
The body of the tower was made by a new technique called “ferrofluid sculpture” that enables artists to create dynamic sculptures with fluid materials. This technique uses one electromagnet, and its iron core is extended and sculpted. The ferrofluid covers the sculpted surface of a three-dimensional iron shape that was made on an electronic NC lathe. The movement of the spikes in the fluid is controlled dynamically on the surface by adjusting the power of the electromagnet. The shape of the iron body is designed as helical so that the fluid can move to the top of the helical tower when the magnetic field is strong enough.
The surface of the tower responds dynamically to its magnetic environment. As there are two towers in the installation, complicated expressions of surfaces become possible. Each tower’s surface pulsates, like one creature calling to the other. Fluid moves synthetically with the music, as if it breathes, and the condition of the fluid's surface emerges as autonomous and complex. In this art we want to harmonize several opposing properties, such as hardness (iron) / softness (fluid) and freedom (desire for design) / restriction (natural powers such as gravity). This work emerges as an autonomous transformation of the material itself: sometimes it seems like a horn, sometimes a fir tree, and sometimes even like the Tower of Babel.


Wednesday 4 April 2007

Man On The Run (iwork your old ipod)



re - iPod any old ipod



no mention of price
just email him

oh so cool
or is that a

Post Cool Development


Sunday 1 April 2007

Difficult To Imagine A World With Flying Dogs


The above artwork is by a friend Artist/Jeweller (Emily Bullock) and
has been selected as a finalist in the Norseweart New Zealand contemporary Art award 2008.
The artist works predominantly with feathers and it appears that this may not necessarily represent a morphed terrier with an eagle but an ankle biter with wings ?
On the other hand I'm certain I've seen something like this,
say a photoshoped eagle dog morph ?
Similarly are there any company logo's out there that represent this particular critter ? Neverthess you nay like to offer us some links in the comments.
Last time Emily submitted a work in this competition she took home the prize money
with bra modeled off her own voluptuous body entirely using feathers.


Nikon Nonetheless Nevertheless




We wonder at times say about the scale of things in the world today. instruments have been created to measure them. We have also created scaling mechanisms to get an appreciation of the relative real sizes to everything like how we can quickly assimilate the notion automatically like making a drawing of a mouse and an elephant on a page but mostly our brains do it - we can conceive a picture in our head first. But how could we draw a picture of the solar system showing a relative scale of each within the drawing. I have for instance wondered how big a piece a paper would have to be to draw a rough map of the universe and possibly a point on the page indicating our solar system ?



On the other hand, computers it seems can offer us an appreciation of the scale of things in our world from the tinniest known particle to the size and scope of our entire universe

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