Engage psudo-science/fiction : So, when you decelerate out of FTL, aren’t you going to give off a lot of Cherenkov Radiation, and doesn’t the transition from hyperspace to realspace carry over a lot of tachyon/dark-matter particles that have to get shed from the ship in a ‘discharging’ action in the relative proximity to a gravity well? And the photons from our gravity well are simply trailing them behind the ship ship and triggering a refraction effect to make it look like a comet tail?

Ok, enough of that, but a boy can dream…

… What ever it is, its gorgeous, and I hope we can get better pictures of it, if not establish communications

Click here to see a larger version [nasa]

Technology as a feature in our lives.
What are the lines between us, and them, and what do we do when a object asks for help?

Some of us spend a lot of time working with computers, and when something goes wrong, we fix it. Not because we should, but because we need it to work.
But what happens when an object, or in this case a mobile robot, who has a purpose that has nothing to do with you, asks for help?

This is a really interesting project, coming out of the ITP program from the Tisch school of the arts at NYU.

In New York City, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me, was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it’s destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.

Watching things like this make me even more angry at the religious dogma that strangles our scientific advancement… Imagine if we had had an additional 8 years of Stem Cell Research behind us at this point. And not 8 years of ignorant positions driven by ignorant people.

This evening I’m headed up to NYC to visit my brother for a few days. I decided to take Bolt Bus. They say it has wifi, and the price is very good.
So what the hell. It can’t be worse then the China Town bus, can it?

Right now, as I type this, I’m sitting about midway back on the bus, plugged in and on the internet at 75mph headed north on I95. The fall evening has turned dark, and I’m listening to friskyradio typing in to the glow of my monitor as the highway blurs by me in the windows. I’m in a sort of future pause right now, as I see what tomorrow will bring us, and how its already here if you’re looking in the right spot.

In 83 Gibson wrote about a ubiquitous data network. At the time it was raw fantasy with the “internet” as we know it only a sketch on a drawing board, and barely connecting only the most major Universities in the world. His vision was of a matrix of computers, connecting everyone together, making communication and the exchange of data effortless and integrated fully with our daily lives. We’re not quite there yet with the level of Virtual Reality he predicted, but its almost impossible to not find somewhere where I can get on line… and the power to share, collaborate, and integrate that it brings us is amazing.

Case in point.
Obama Iphone App.

The Obama campaign continues to blow the lid off of what you can do with the internet in coordinating grassroots campaign movements. Wired has a great article on how it is connecting people all over the country in a way that has never been done before, for the purpose of grassroots organizing.

And now the Obama campaign has an iPhone app thats leveraging the digital device we have in our pockets to track and manage that same campaign at the level of what you, as a single person can

The ability to share information quickly and effortlessly is the biggest problem with running any organization. Your team can not execute the plan if they don’t have the knowledge to do what you want them to do. The advent of the internet as a way of distributing that information easily was the first step. The devices that most of us carry in our pockets are just waiting for the connectivity to take the next step.

The iPhone, I’ve always said, is the first generation of a new paradigm in connected devices. its easier to use, slicker, better interface, and developed in mind for applications as a small computer, not as a phone. Its screaming for applications that leverage our own personal data, such as your phone book, and GPS sharing, with a larger organizaation that needs you to participate in the mission at hand. Leverage this for any grassroots or low capital oganization that needs to maintain connectivity and organization and you no longer have to have offices, phone trees, or even email if the system communicates the data you need to share exactly how it needs to be consumed at the other end. If that data integrates with you personal knowledge, such as the phone book, or GPS system, you then have the ability of coordinating that data with real action in real time. The Campaign software tracks calls made, and your position when you make the call (its not tracking who, just that a call was made from its interface). This data can be shared with the head quarters, and you’ve instantly got a knowledge network based on not only abstract contact info, but also geospecial relationships. You know know exactly where the holes are in your coverage, and can see whos near by to fill it.

I think its brilliant, and for the purpose of a volunteer force organizing to elect a man president its perfect for their needs.

this *IS* what we’ll see in 4 years, and in 8 years, and I cna’t even imagine in 12 years….

The military has been working on the smart warrior technology that does this for the use of soldiers on the ground for decades, I think a simple iPhone app made it look old, and useless all of a sudden.

I don’t want a day when you can’t unplug.
But the day when everything I need to do my job, and connect with who and what I want to connect with is right around the corner, and I can taste it. The future is in beta, and we’re all testing it.

In short, IMAX breaks the technology that is at hand for most movie production studios, even the big ones. Well worth the read.

To support the IMAX scenes, the studios could not work in full IMAX resolution, which is theoretically 18K; instead, the target resolution was approximately 8K, the maximum resolution for scanned film. Even that was difficult. “A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data,” Franklin says. “So we had to upgrade our whole infrastructure. We needed faster network speeds to move data around, massively beefed up servers, and — the most important thing — a new compositing solution.”

I guess I’m going to have to see this film for real now…

The first trailer of this looked horrible.
Then I saw a pretty decent red-band trailer…

now I saw this, and… wow.