Archive for January, 2008

DNA Through the Eyes of a Coder

This is an interesting little piece of work on this site that we’re linking you to.AA It might be a little bit heady if you know nothing about DNA and or coding, but for the eligible, check it out!

20+ Mobile Internet Applications

Mashable has a list of 20+ interesting mobile internet applications for all you phone-headed ninjas. Head on over there to check it out.

Robot Artist

Created by robotic researcher Sylvain Calinon, the robot recognizes when therea€™s a face in front of it, snaps a digital photo and extracts the major characteristics of their portrait. Then it goes to work with its gangster quill pen, and creates a sketch portrait.

article via BotJunkie

Ninjas Never Die

I had been knowing that I was going to live forever, for various reasons [please - you know real ninjas never die, son] - but apparently the rest of you can hope to live for eternity too, or at least for a millennium or so. There is an actual field of science devoted to the study of ageing [and anti-ageing], and many believe that there are people living today [as old as 60] who will have the opportunity to live for a thousand years thanks to modern science/medicine.

A growing number of maverick scientists, doctors, researchers, biogeneticists and nano-technologists a€" many with impeccable academic credentials a€" insist that the war against ageing can be won. All believe significantly longer lifespans and, perhaps eventually, true biological immortality, are not only possible but also scientifically achievable. What’s more, it could happen in time to aid those now living.

a€oeThe first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today; indeed, he or she may be about to turn 60,a€A says Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge University geneticist who has become the de facto spokesman of the anti-ageing crusade. a€oeWhether they realise it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.a€A Nutty? Some scientists do dismiss de Grey as a wildly optimistic crank. But plenty of others, though not necessarily accepting all his predictions, have joined in the search for a real fountain of youth. a€oeI am working on immortality,a€A says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who has already achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies. a€oeTwenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off-the-wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible.a€A

And I would MOST DEFINITELY get myself the ill katana and start chasing after heads a hundred years or so in…who knows, those movies could have been fact sonny.

Read the full article here, at WorldHealth.net.

Also of interest - what would happen if we DID live forever?

No End in Sight

In reference to the previous post:

"You Don’t Understand Our Audience"

This is an excerpt from an excellent article by John Hockenberry, recommended by a friend, which also includes a brief description of the "Cherry Blossoms" project, pictured below.AA I’ll tell you like a ninja told me, it’s long but worth it.

Advertisers were aggressive in their use of new technologies long before network news divisions went anywhere near them. This is exactly the opposite of the trend in the 1960s and ’70s, when the news divisions were first adopters of breakthroughs in live satellite and video technology. But in the 1990s, advertisers were quick to use the Internet to seek information about consumers, exploiting the potential of communities that formed around products and brands. Throughout the time I was at the network, GE ads were all over NBC programs like Meet the Press and CNBC’s business shows, but they seemed never to appear on Dateline. (They also had far higher production values than the news programs and even some entertainment shows.) Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and N.W.A were already major cultural icons; grunge and hip-hop were the soundtrack for commercials at the moment networks were passing on stories about Kurt Cobain’s suicide and Tupac Shakur’s murder.

Meanwhile, on 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney famously declared his own irrelevance by being disgusted that a spoiled Cobain could find so little to love about being a rock star that he would kill himself. Humor in commercials was hip-subtle, even, in its use of obscure pop-cultural references-but if there were any jokes at all in news stories, they were telegraphed, blunt visual gags, usually involving weathermen. That disjunction remains: at the precise moment that Apple cast John Hodgman and Justin Long as dead-on avatars of the PC and the Mac, news anchors on networks that ran those ads were introducing people to multibillion-dollar phenomena like MySpace and Facebook with the cringingly naAAve attitude of "What will those nerds think of next?" [LINK]

For more info about Alyssa Wright’s Cherry Blossoms, click here.

Thanks to Ben for hipping us to the game.

Brad Downey in Manhattan

Brad Downey sculpture in Manhattan, via - more of his work can be seen here, here, and here.