tingilinde

for a certain community

Time to get your credit cards ready for Bjarne's C++11 book.  I haven't seen it, but I can guarantee there has been a massive amount of very careful work in this one.

low end 3d printing

Perhaps fun for the kids ... actually a 2d printing tool that makes 3d objects with a conventional color printer, scissors and adhesive.

Foldify from Pixle on Vimeo.

(hat tip to john)

Similar to the technique that is being tried in fashion and more practical for many early applications involving the printing of physical objects.

sorting out itunes 11

Those who use iTunes find themselves with the first major redesign of the very cluttered interface in many years.  A discussion of what is new and how to configure it to your needs.  I've been using it for about four days and am finding it a big improvement so far.  

partly cloudy...

I have way too many weather apps for my iPhone.  

It isn't my favorite, but Partly Cloudy has a fascinating user interface.  Problems include switching between cities (it needs some sort of gesture support), the preferences are out of place and it isn't terribly intuitive until you play around with it for awhile.  But the interface is novel and may appeal to you.

For quick checks of the weather my current favorite is Check the Weather which requires another app, Dark Sky, for full functionality.  I use RadarScope on my Macs, iPhone and iPad to get a fairly unprocessed doppler radar from NOAA's NEXRAD level 3 realtime data feed.

Dark Sky is very useful by itself if you are interested in what your local weather is likely to be in the next hour and Sky Motion gives similar predictions.

Lightning Finder shows near real time (one minute delay) lightning strikes around the US.  You can even set alerts to txt you with warnings that an electrical storm is approaching.  Basically an interface to a yearly subscription service, but worth it to me.

I find Seasonality for the Mac and iPad the best for offering detailed information and, of course, I bookmark the NJ climate page for the weather station about 3 km from our home on the Rutger's Climate site.  Very detaled and relevant information for our location - although it is focused on the short term history of the weather. I would love to see an app that allows you to easily find such resources for any location on the planet... sort of a "Siri, display the closest weather station..."

All of the other weather apps I've seen tend ot offer similar generic information with varying degrees of user interface sophistication.  Those I've listed stand out.  None is perfect - a brilliant interface that integrates all of these would be great, but it may not be possible to have it all in something beautiful and simple (NEXRAD radar, for example, requires ou to spend a few hours learning about what each of the feeds means)..

 

 

playing with special relativity

This reminds me a lot of George Gamow's Mr Tompkins  in Wonderland series... an early effort to popularize "modern" physics...

A game from MIT to let you play around in a world where the speed of light is seriously slower than in our universe to help you get a better grasp of relativity. OS X and Windows versions available...  It should be noted it is a prototype with some rough edges.  I tried it for awhile and recommend you use a mouse rather than a trackpad.

snip

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player's own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience.

 

 (hat tip to Zach)

 

romney's red screen of death

Accounts are beginning to appear on the massive fail that was Orca - the Republican big data tool for managing their voter effort on election day.  If they are to be believed, these guys were novices with a poor understanding of how this is done.  That fundamental problem was compounded by a strong belief that they knew what they were doing.  For a candidate and campaign that prided themselves on business fundamentals they seemed more than a little clueless.

A basic discussion here and a piece form the apolitical, but technical, Ars Technica.

just amazing naïvety ...  it will be fascinating to read deeper post mortems as they emerge.  It is ironic to the point of being  hilarious (at least if you aren't a Republican) that Team Romney would outsource something so core to their effort.  It is really important to deeply undersand such tools.  On the other hand a lot of businesses have serious technical cluelessness and jump from trend to trend without understanding much - perhaps they were just a failed business effort in the tend. 

visualizing the tree of life

Jean points out a piece on OneZoom tool for exploring evolution's Tree of Life.

be sure to watch the short introductory video to get a sense of what they are trying to do.

 

the musical heart

What music is optimal for your heart?  Music recommendation via bio-feedback and collaboration.  Some interesting work by folks at the University of Virginia and Microsoft.  A preprint of their paper here

 

MusicalHeart: A Hearty Way of Listening to Music 

Shahriar Nirjon, Robert F. Dickerson, Qiang Li, Philip Asare, and John A. Stankovic Department of Computer Science University of Virginia, USA 

Dezhi Hong, Ben Zhang, Xiaofan Jiang, Guobin Shen, and Feng Zhao Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China 

Abstract

MusicalHeart is a biofeedback-based, context-aware, au- tomated music recommendation system for smartphones. We introduce a new wearable sensing platform, Septimu, which consists of a pair of sensor-equipped earphones that communicate to the smartphone via the audio jack. The Septimu platform enables the MusicalHeart application to continuously monitor the heart rate and activity level of the user while listening to music. The physiological information and contextual information are then sent to a remote server, which provides dynamic music suggestions to help the user maintain a target heart rate. We provide empirical evidence that the measured heart rate is 75% − 85% correlated to the ground truth with an average error of 7.5 BPM. The accu- racy of the person-specific, 3-class activity level detector is on average 96.8%, where these activity levels are separated based on their differing impacts on heart rate. We demon- strate the practicality of MusicalHeart by deploying it in two real world scenarios and show that MusicalHeart helps the user achieve a desired heart rate intensity with an average error of less than 12.2%, and its quality of recommendation improves over time. 

 

 

more on apple's google supplied map info vs apple's

an interesting path to follow - clearly there are many issues and it is interesting to sort out what they are.

In the end I don't think this is a huge kerfuffel - it is probably something Apple had to do given the competitive state between Google and Apple and the consumer isn't really hurt due to the presence of alternatives as apps and bookmarkable webpages.  Apple's timing and method of announcement were probably botched, but they also had to break the contract this year if there is a two year minimum as has been suggested.  

 From my point of view the main game is not the relative success and failures of the tactics of individual companies, but the larger issues.  One falls under what is often called network neutrality and the other the unusually high prices seem in the US for high speed fixed and wireless access relative to other countries.

 

microsoft and the apple/samsung verdict

Probably too much is being written on the Apple/Samsung verdict, but my guess is Microsoft sent Tim Cook (Apple's CEO who happened to be celebrating his first full year as CEO yesterday) an awfully nice bottle of wine last night.

It may be the total cost to a phone marker for Windows may be comparable to or even less than the "free" Andorid due to licensing fees from Apple and Microsoft - and potentially others.  Not to mention the Microsoft UI offering a very nice counterpoint to Apple's.

It may well be that it comes down to Google having to indemnify the phone makers who lose suits if it wants them to continue using Android. 

A relevant question for those who value companies and buyouts is how much would Motorola be worth today compared to what Google paid?