Entertainment/New Media

The new iPad: awesome

The new iPad, introduced today, has a 264 pixels/inch “retina” display with 2048 x 1536 pixels (3.1 million), compared to 1920 x 1080 with HDTV; 5 megapixels camera with 1080P HD video (and new version of iMovie) with autofocus and face detection in still images; new A5X quad-core processor that is “four times as fast [...]

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Future music invades the Grammys

For me, the best part of the Grammys Sunday night wasn’t on the telecast. It was the three pre-awards to the amazing dubstep artist Skrillex: Best Dance Recording and Best Dance/Electronica Album (both for “Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites”) and Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical (for “Cinema” remix track from Electroman). “Bass riffs that sound like fire-breathing dragons, vocal melodies that closely [...]

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Will the Kinect 2 read your lips? Open the pod bay door, HAL

The next generation of the Kinect (bundled with future Xbox consoles) may be “so accurate it can lip read,” the Technology Review Hello World headline breathlessly reads — evoking HAL 9000 in 2001. What’s more, says Eurogamer, citing a nameless source, “Kinect 2 will be so powerful it will enable games to detect when players [...]

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‘Pig’ movie: question reality

Pig is a trippy indy film that starts weird and gets weirder, with hints of Memento, Total Recall, Groundhog Day, The Truman Show, Vanilla Sky, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Starring Rudolf Martin (Vlad Dracula in The Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula and Ari Haswari in NCIS), the film engaged my mind right [...]

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How to make movies of what the brain sees

Remember the movie Brainstorm? Imagine watching someone’s dream, or tapping directly into the mind of a coma patient. University of California, Berkeley scientists claim they have finally achieved this classic futuristic movie “mind reading” trope. Sorta. They’re using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models to decode and reconstruct people’s dynamic visual experiences. So [...]

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teleXLR8 returns, featuring quantum physicist Gildert on ‘Hack the Multiverse!’

This exciting news just in from Giulio Prisco: “teleXLR8 is reopening on Sunday 21 10 a.m. PST with a talk by [experimental quantum physicist/programmer] Suzanne Gildert on Hack the Multiverse!.” The teleXLR8 online talk program is “a telepresence community for cultural acceleration,” as their blog puts it. Translation: an audiovideo seminar — think TED in [...]

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The physics of Jackson Pollock

Can you tell the difference between a painting by an elephant and Jackson Pollack? (Take this test before reading further.) A mathematician at Harvard University and a physicist-art historian at Boston College think they can. Pollock was an “intuitive master” of laws that govern the flow of liquids under gravity, they believe. The researchers examined the [...]

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Ads for monkeys: sign of the end times?

This is not an Onion story. No, really. Turns out Laurie Santos gave a TED talk last year on “monkeynomics” — the realization that monkeys understood an abstract idea like currency. Unfortunately, two advertising executives happened to be in the audience, New Scientist reports today. The result: a monkey ad campaign (shown at the Cannes Lions [...]

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Stephen Malinowski’s ‘Music Animation Machine’

Magnets, how exactly do they work?

Know Your Meme | Internet Scientist Elspeth Jane of The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies explores the viral sensation that was Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles,” aka “F***ing Magnets: How Do They Work?” [ For more info on this, visit the Meme Database! ]

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