Category: Blogging

This is the personal playground of Hakim El Hattab, exploring what is possible using HTML5 and Canvas. Most recent addition includes Sinuous, a simple game built using canvas which will test your mouse pointer reflexes by having you direct your cursor against incoming meteors. My other personal favourites include Blob, Magnetic, Particle Depth and Particles.

Head over to hakim.se/experiments for some awesome HMTL5 fun or play with the code here.. Looking forward to see what’s next…

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Hakim Experiments [Scripts, HMTL5] is a post from: CreativeApplications.Net | Follow us on Twitter – Facebook – Flickr – Vimeo

Related Posts:

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Launched in 1992 by Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting, the Cartoon Network was a godsend to, well, cartoon lovers with 24-hour cartoon programming, mostly re-runs. In the past few years, with original series and its hipster- and geek-attracting Adult Swim block in the wee hours of the night, Cartoon Network (CN) has become one of the most attractive and genuine channels on television. From its humble beginnings, CN is now broadcast in 166 countries. But its identity has been a little wobbly in the last two years or so with an initial switch from the well-known checkerboard logo to a short-lived, perspective acronym that, I’m guessing, didn’t fair too well as it just got shelved earlier this year when CN started to run a new on-air identity in May, designed by animation powerhouse Brand New School in collaboration with the talented in-house team at CN. This week a new range of on-air identity applications started to roll out.

The network chose to embrace its brand visual heritage of the black and white checkerboard by imbuing it with new meaning, and the artists and producers of BNS were able to bring this idea to life in a fresh, compelling way using dimension, color and movement. All the new design elements began appearing in late May, and the new on-air IDs premiered on the network this week.

“Our brand expansion represents our commitment to delivering a breadth of content that our audience cannot find anywhere else,” said Senior Vice President of Creative Direction, Michael Ouweleen. “The checkerboard is in our DNA and is not only reflected in the subtle redesign of the logo but also provides a through line that connects and helps frame our diverse slate of programming from animation to live-action. The art direction and creative acumen of the Brand New School and their ability to breathe new into the iconic was invaluable and helped us achieve our goal.”
— Press Release

The before-before logo, with the well-known checkerboard design.

“CHECK it” tagline and lock-up with logo.

When I first saw the perspective logo submitted as a tip I didn’t post it because, even at that time, I felt like it was maybe just a “phase.” There didn’t seem to be longevity attached to it. What I didn’t like about it is that it screamed “Cartoons!” whereas the old and new ones are just identifiers for the cartoons themselves, they don’t have to act like cartoons. So it’s very nice to see CN pull back and go back to what made the original logo more successful. There are no magic revelations in the new logo. It’s the old “C” and “N” pulled out of the original, blown up and put side to side. Simple.

Black-and-white and color patterns.

Stationery.

Show icons.

Lifestyle icons.

The new identity is surprisingly basic in its visual elements: CMYK colors, dots, crosses, squares, a grid. Yet the applications are playfully complex and versatile. Giving CN a broad range of possible executions without feeling too repetitive.

Office application renderings.

And when it comes to the visual pyrotechnics of on-air animation… good luck getting bored by it.

“Because we’d created such a gridded and structured designs for the overall approach, it became imperative that the movement of these pieces felt snappy, fast-paced, and above all, playful and full of life,” said Calvert. “Our animators developed a language that’s rooted in familiar physical interactions, but caricatured and amplified into something incredibly captivating and energetic.”
— Press Release

Montage from Cartoon Network’s 2010 On-Air Brand Expansion from Brand New School on Vimeo.

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Stanford University engineers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil.

Called “photon enhanced thermionic emission,” or PETE, the process promises to surpass the efficiency of existing photovoltaic and thermal conversion technologies.

Most photovoltaic cells, such as those used in rooftop solar panels, use the semiconducting material silicon to convert the energy from photons of light to electricity. But the cells can only use a portion of the light spectrum, with the rest just generating heat.

This heat from unused sunlight and inefficiencies in the cells themselves account for a loss of more than 50 percent of the initial solar energy reaching the cell.

If this wasted heat energy could somehow be harvested, solar cells could be much more efficient. The problem has been that high temperatures are necessary to power heat-based conversion systems, yet solar cell efficiency rapidly decreases at higher temperatures.

Combining light and heat could almost triple efficiency

A group headed by Nick Melosh, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, figured out that by coating a piece of semiconducting material with a thin layer of the metal cesium, it made the material able to use both light and heat to generate electricity.

Melosh is senior author of a paper describing the tests the researchers conducted. It was published online Aug. 1 in Nature Materials.

“What we’ve demonstrated is a new physical process that is not based on standard photovoltaic mechanisms, but can give you a photovoltaic-like response at very high temperatures,” Melosh said. “In fact, it works better at higher temperatures. The higher the better.”

Melosh calculates the PETE process can get to 50 percent efficiency or more under solar concentration, but if combined with a thermal conversion cycle, could reach 55 or even 60 percent – almost triple the efficiency of existing systems.

“The PETE process could really give the feasibility of solar power a big boost,” Melosh said. “Even if we don’t achieve perfect efficiency, let’s say we give a 10 percent boost to the efficiency of solar conversion, going from 20 percent efficiency to 30 percent, that is still a 50 percent increase overall.”

And that is still a big enough increase that it could make solar energy competitive with oil.

The research was largely funded by the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, which is a joint venture of Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with additional support from the Department of Energy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

More info: Stanford University news

Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt — about five exabytes of data.

He cautioned that just because companies like his can do all sorts of things with this information, the more pressing question now is if they should. Schmidt noted that while technology is neutral, he doesn’t believe people are ready for what’s coming.

“I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,” Schmidt said.

Nanex, the data services firm, has discovered mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchange. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade.

Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

The company’s software engineer Jeffrey Donovan thinks that the odd algorithms are just a way of introducing noise into the works. Other firms have to deal with that noise, but the originating entity can easily filter it out because they know what they did. Perhaps that gives them an advantage of some milliseconds.

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Creating 404 pages (the error page you get when a page on a site cannot be located) has become something of an artform. Startups can earn major bonus points in the geek community for having a humorous one. And Blippy has just tapped a perfect meme for their’s.

As you can see here, Blippy’s 404 page features a glorious rainbow. And while it’s not exactly a double rainbow, the cute unicorn child creature seems to think it may be. “What does it mean…,” he wonders.

Well if you click on him, you can find out…

It’s a double rainbow all the way!

Keep clicking…

OMG A TRIPLE RAINBOW!

As a sidenote, some people may think Twitter has the most famous 404 page these days with the Fail Whale. But that’s not actually a 404 error. Technically, the Fail Whale is a 503: Service Unavailable, error. The Twitter 404 page is much less exciting (below).

Harvard University researchers have uncovered a mechanism through which caloric restriction and exercise delay some of the debilitating effects of aging by rejuvenating the connections between nerves and the muscles that they control.

The research, conducted in the labs of Joshua Sanes and Jeff Lichtman, both members of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard and professors of molecular and cellular biology, begins to explain prior findings that exercise and restricted-calorie diets help to stave off the mental and physical degeneration of aging.

Their research, conducted through laboratory mice genetically engineered so their nerve cells glow in fluorescent colors, shows that some of the debilitation of aging is caused by the deterioration of connections that nerves make with the muscles they control, structures called neuromuscular junctions. These microscopic links are remarkably similar to the synapses that connect neurons to form information-processing circuits in the brain.

In a healthy neuromuscular synapse, nerve endings and their receptors on muscle fibers are almost a perfect match, like two hands placed together, finger to finger, palm to palm. This lineup ensures maximum efficiency in transmitting the nerve’s signal from the brain to the muscle, which is what makes it contract during movement.

As people age, however, the neuromuscular synapses can deteriorate in several ways. Nerves can shrink, failing to cover the muscle’s receptors completely. Sanes said the intersections between the nerves and muscles can go from a continuous network that looks like a pretzel to one that resembles a bunch of beads — broken into discontinuous individual lumps, interfering with transmission of nerve impulses to the muscles. This loss of activity can result in wasting and eventually even death of muscle fibers.

The work showed that mice on a restricted-calorie diet largely avoid that age-related deterioration of their neuromuscular junctions, while those on a one-month exercise regimen when already elderly partially reverse the damage.

“With calorie restriction, we saw reversal of all of these things. With exercise, we saw a reversal of most, but not all,” Sanes said.

Because of the study’s structure — mice were on calorie-restricted diets for their whole lives, while those that exercised did so for just the month late in life — Sanes cautioned against drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of exercise versus calorie restriction in preventing or reversing synaptic damage. He noted that longer periods of exercise might have more profound effects, a possibility he and Lichtman are now testing.

The research was published online by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and financed through grants from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the Ellison Medical Foundation.

Beyond the ease of study, neuromuscular junctions are important areas to understand because the gradual loss of muscle mass and strength, known to scientists as sarcopenia, is a problem in the elderly, debilitating otherwise healthy individuals who can lose their balance and break a hip or other bones, leading to a cascade of physical ills.

While the changes to the synapses through caloric restriction and exercise were clear in the images the researchers obtained, Sanes cautioned that their work was structural, not functional, and they have not yet tested how well the synapses worked.

More info: Harvard University news

A huge mass of magnetically charged material ejected from the sun is racing across space toward our planet, where it is expected to arrive on Tuesday. When it strikes the Earth’s magnetic field, it could produce spectacular auroras.

photojojo:

Sandrine Estrade Boulet’s photos are a different kind of street art.

She photographs seemingly ordinary objects strewn about the city sidewalks and later brings them to life with clever illustrations!

[via Love from Fifi]

The world celebrates the 11th SysAdminDay today. To all the users out there: This is a nice opportunity to thank your admin staff for doing migrations at night to keep your business running at day, for making seemingly impossible requirements possible, for keeping the systems up and running, for answering your questions, that would be able to answer yourself with google in the time you need to pick up the phone

And keep in mind, your admin would do everything for you to restore the operations of your datacenter:

Typing on the iPhone is like squeezing sausages into a soda can – you can get it to work, but it’s not pretty. BlindType is changing that. The startup has created a new touchscreen keyboard program of the same name that changes size, orientation, and position to match your wandering fingers as they type. BlindType also features some of the most impressive typing correction software I’ve ever seen. The result is a practical touchscreen interface that knows what you meant to type, even if you make mistakes. Lots of them. In fact, you can type without looking at the screen at all! It’s amazing, and I got to see it in person when I visited with BlindType creators Kostas Eleftheriou and Panos Petropoulos in San Francisco. Check out their demonstration video below. It’s hard to believe that they developed this software in less than one year.

Because BlindType is still under development Kostas and Panos would only let me take still shots of the program. Yet as you can see in their public demo video, BlindType lets the user be sloppy. When I tried the program on an iPad I could relax about mistakes. Not in spelling, but in the actual way I actually tried to hit keys on the touchscreen keyboard. Do you have fat fingers like me? Not a problem. Do your hands migrate slowly as you type? It can handle that too. Hold your iPad to one side, type in progressively larger or smaller movements, even ditch the keyboard altogether. BlindType can deal with it all.  Just watch and learn:

If you found the above demonstration for BlindType impressive, you’re not alone. The video received more than 300,000 hits in its first week. Those are great numbers for a tech demo from a startup on YouTube. Kostas and Panos were so impressed with the positive response they even created a follow up thank you video:

Why all the hullabaloo? BlindType is easing one of the biggest fears people have about touchscreen interfaces: they don’t trust a keyboard without feedback. BlindType doesn’t let you feel the letters but it does give you a lot of confidence in your typing. Kostas and Panos wanted a system that assumed the typist knew what they were doing. If you type one letter on the right, another on the left, and you don’t directly hit the keys, BlindType tries to figure out what you meant to hit. Sometimes it can surprise you. Kostas and Panos dared me to see how poorly I could type and still have the right word appear. I typed without really looking at the keyboard and entered something like “ubvunvryjankt”. BlindType knew I meant “inconceivable”. I was amazed. Kostas and Panos laughed, they get that all the time.

That’s when I really felt challenged and I tried my absolute damnedest to defeat BlindType. I’m glad I did. I learned how robust the system is. We turned off the keyboard. It didn’t appear on the iPad screen at all. I typed in different directions, different speeds, and randomly changed the space I put between the letters I was trying to type. BlindType handled it all with relative ease. When I entered in new words the program didn’t know (like my last name), a little menu popped up letting me store them in a custom dictionary with just one touch. Easy.

Of course it’s not perfect. As Kostas and Panos helped me see, the program has limitations. BlindType is a typing correcter, not a spelling correcter. If you mistype a word by adding or subtracting a lot of letters, it doesn’t work well. It comes with a spell-checker/auto-correction feature (or it will) but don’t expect it to perform wonders on both typing and spelling simultaneously. It’s good, but there’s only so much decoding that’s mathematically possible.

There’s also limitations on the physical side of things. You have the choice of leaving the spacebar enabled or disabled. If you enable it, then there’s a fixed point on an otherwise unfixed keyboard. That means you have to actually hit the spacebar button where it’s supposed to be – that’s not always easy if you’re typing sloppily. If you disable the spacebar then spaces are inputed by swiping left to right. That’s a reasonable adaptation to ask of a user, but it takes a little getting used to.

And Kostas and Panos are still working out how to get the program to differentiate between very fast typing and swiping. So if you type as fast as you possibly can sometimes the program thinks that two letters next to each other was actually you trying to make a swiping motion. Same with resting your fingers on the touchscreen – right now the program thinks you are trying to make a long swipe. Panos said they could solve that pretty easily in the future.

More limitations? Sure: if you have to swipe left to right, then as you rotate the phone (or iPad) you have to be careful about what direction it considers left to right. There’s a little arrow to help you keep track of this, and the program reorientates itself after every new word, but you can, if you’re nasty, confuse BlindType by typing things upside down or backwards (I told you I felt challenged). Most users aren’t going to intentionally try to cause a failure though, so this is a very minor limitation.

All in all, I was simply blown away by how BlindType transformed me from a timid typist into a bold keyboard-challenging beast. I was so confident in the program’s skills (in just a few minutes of using it!) that I was typing super sloppy and expecting the best. And I got it the vast majority of the time.

With the product being so sound, I was naturally interested in how it worked, and how they developed it. That’s when Kostas and Panos got very tight-lipped. They’ve received so much attention, from apparently some big name people, that they can’t discuss anything. They won’t even generally describe how BlindType approaches the problem. I guessed it was analyzing the relative position between finger taps and they just gave me their best poker faces. No revelations at all. Kostas did allude to the fact that this is an AI project…but not much was said beyond that.

And BlindType is a small company, so there’s little chance that the secrets will leak out. In fact, BlindType really just has two employees: Kostas and Panos – cousins from Greece. Though they’ve had help with testing and such, the two of them essentially developed this program on their own. That floored me. How long did it take them to create it? A few months! Though Panos admitted they have been thinking about it “for about a year.”

Just as they are reluctant to discuss the specifics of BlindType’s inner workings, Kostas and Panos are not giving details about their funding or ongoing agreements with manufacturers. Will it be installed on the manufacturing side or the consumer side (like an App)? No comment. If it is consumer-side, will it be free, $1, or $25? No comment. The only real answer I got from them is when I asked them if they had enough money to fund the rest of the program’s development. They gave me enigmatic smiles and said, “oh, we’ve got no worries.”

Clearly they think BlindType is going to be big. Will it succeed? Well, users are attracted to the promise of a better system, that much is clear. Touchscreen keyboards and predictive text algorithms are also a big business. Currently there are hundreds of millions of touchscreen devices sold each year and those numbers only look to rise as slate computers like the iPad gain ground. Nearly every single one of these machines needs a virtual keyboard and associated auto-correction software. When I asked Kostas and Panos which devices they were looking to port BlindType to, they simply said “all of them.” Or at least as many as they could. Their goal, which is also stated on their website, “is to become the largest player in the industry.” The potential rewards of that industry are large. Back in 1999, the T9 predictive type software sold for $350 million in stock to AOL, though it was sold again in 2007 for just $269 M.

In the short term, BlindType is going to focus on mobile touchscreens. The program runs on iPad and iPhone and will be running on Android phones soon. That’s millions of units right there. But Kostas and Panos talked about it eventually being used on all kinds of touchscreens, from new PC desktops to street kiosks. And what about phones with little plastic keyboards like the Blackberry? BlindType could easily be adapted to improve accuracy there too. In fact, chances are that BlindType could be used in just about every keyboard (virtual or physical) there is. Think about that. This is a huge product.

It’s probably coming to you soon. While they won’t reveal specifics about product launch, Kostas and Panos said that beta testing will happen soon. Working with the product as I did, it seemed really close to ready. Kostas said that it takes about 150 milliseconds for BlindType to process each word, and the industry standard is 200 ms, so that’s a good sign this product is good to go. As BlindType makes more announcements about it’s progress, we’ll keep you up to date.

And what does all of this have to do with the Singularity and accelerating technology? Artificial intelligence is analyzing flawed human output and predicting what the person ‘really meant’. There’s a lot of potential there. BlindType is a narrow application, but as AI gets better at interpreting human input, it will let us use machines more naturally. Right now we’re worried about virtual keyboards, but think about brain computer interfaces. Computers won’t just have to decode sloppy typing, they’ll have to decode sloppy thoughts. Programs like BlindType are only the beginning. As machines and humans become more interconnected, we’ll need more ingenious ways of building confidence in those connections. Kostas and Panos may have solved virtual keyboard problems in a few months. Let’s hope our future user interfaces will be able to be improved as quickly.

[image credits: Aaron Saenz/Singularity Hub]

[source: BlindType]

A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.

Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has developed an innovative new description of the Universe in which time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other.

In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant. So as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts.

This universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction. In fact, Shu shows that singularities cannot exist in this cosmos.

Good news for all you aspiring Craig Venters out there. Before the end of the year, synthetic biologists will have a stocked factory of DNA building blocks with which to remix microbe life forms – one that will provide standardized, reliable components for the most creative of life sciences. Best of all? It’s free.

As we previously reported, the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology (BIOFAB) is a project to produce thousands of standardized genetic “parts” for researchers to use in the pioneering work of synthetic biology. Started with a seed grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), BIOFAB is the world’s very first biological design-build facility. They will be providing bioparts to researchers gratis to speed along national research into new drugs, biofuels, chemicals, you name it – all the promising frontiers of synthetic biology. And they should be open for business within 6 months.

So what exactly is a synthetic biology “part”? Good question – that was exactly the topic of the project’s first human practices report (found here). The short answer is that biological parts are small snippets of DNA with basic, well-understood functions (e.g. the production of a certain protein). Building a microbe from scratch is no easy task, especially if you have to identify and characterize all of these building blocks yourself. That’s exactly what synthetic biologists have been doing – it costs millions of dollars and takes years of legwork.

Synthetic biology is an emerging field that combines biology and engineering to reconfigure DNA into desirable results, generally microorganisms that can be used to produce drugs, perform chemical reactions, or work as fuels. But because the field is so new, there haven’t yet been standards set for what works and what doesn’t. Characterizing these basic components (and providing them) will give a common engineering language for researchers working on very different problems. It will also make potential progress faster and cheaper.

But researchers will still have their work cut out for them. One of the most problematic issues for synthetic biology – and one that BIOFAB deals with regularly – is that DNA snippets are only “parts” in the context of some “whole.” Genes work in complex networks, altering one another’s expression in interdependent ways; removed from the context of a larger genome, the function of any particular genetic strand changes. This makes the issue of isolating concrete characteristics to each part a difficult task: it acts differently depending on the surrounding DNA. It’s significant that this difficulty is precisely what has been a major road block for post-Genome Project genetics more generally.

So who sets the standards? Consider it Biology 2.0. Collaborative, open source efforts from many different labs have resulted in the emergence of what are called BioBrick standard parts. Many of these have been collected and housed at the Registry for Standard Biological Parts, founded in 2003 at MIT (we ran a story on this last year). The director of BIOFAB, Drew Endy of Stanford, was instrumental in shaping BioBrick part standards – and now his team is building a factory to provide them to the research world.

BIOFAB was launched in January of this year, and is currently a small scale operation (they have about 10 staff members total). The project is housed in a Lawrence Berkeley National Labs building in Emeryville, CA, and is a collaboration between researchers from UC Berkeley and Stanford (apparently despite the football rivalry). Perhaps a dubious award to some, BIOFAB was named “Best Local Innovator” by the East Bay Express, a Bay Area paper which also recommends the taco truck near my house. Suffice to say I trust their opinion.

thedailywhat:

Smart Pet Tricks of the Day: Fuck Yeah Extreme Parrot Tricks!!!

[b&p.]

ihateseagulls-:(via naejanod)

The developers of Griid, the Ableton Live controller on iPad created in association with Richie Hawtin, have shared photos and screen captures early with CDM to give us a look at the upcoming app. Just over a decade after its original inception, Ableton Live itself remains a ground-breaking user interface design. Love it or hate it, it’s a benchmark in thinking about how music apps might look. Griid is compelling in part because it re-imagines how that central Session View and clip launching might work, now in the context of a touch tablet. Personally, I like the results. As on the Lemur, bold, saturated colors and contrast on a black background are central, of course. It’s also nice to see extraneous visual information removed. And for anyone with epic-sized sets of clips in Live, you’ll like the massive overview.

This also makes me wonder what may be possible with Renoise’s pattern editor, which also uses colored blocks to show off units of patterns and the like (and could similarly be controlled from new input devices thanks to its API). All in all, I think we could see an explosion of thinking about control in performance. If that leads to better performances – or if we just have more fun – I’m for it.

Let us know what you think of the shots, and if it gives you any insights into what’s happening with the app or how you might play your own live sets. For that matter, is touch something you’d consider in the first place, or would you prefer tactile control?

Looks like Aang wasn’t the last Airbender after all:

The Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon sequel is official, and here are the details.

I really can use a holiday right now but unfortunately (with me being pregnant) it won’t be before next year before we will be able to travel again. In the mean time I keep dreaming about luxurious hotels like this one in Greece. Cavo Tagoo is a beautiful boutique hotel on the island of Mykonos. The hotel, which is ingeniously engineered into the cliff-side, consists of several buildings connected to each other through a maze of staircases like the alleys of Mykonos.

The hotel itself is modern and luxurious but it has been build with respect to the island’s traditional elements.

All guest rooms and suites have been designed to embody a contemporary aesthetic while remaining true to the traditional character and architecture of the Cycladic Islands. For more information you can visit the hotel’s website.

(images from Marie Claire Maison)

thatjamiegirl:

9gag:

Danger, Danger