Meteorite Pieces Found in Saskatchewan

•December 2, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Fragments of a huge meteorite that lit up the skies across Alberta and Saskatchewan last week have been found near the border city of Lloydminster, University of Calgary scientists say.

U of C Planetary Scientist Dr. Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley announced Friday morning they located several meteorite fragments late Thursday afternoon.

They believe thousands of meteorite bits are strewn over 20 square kilometres near the Battle River.

Friday afternoon, they led a group of reporters to the site — a region called Buzzard Coulee, about 40 kilometres from Lloydminster.

Fragments of a meteorite were found in a small pond at Buzzard Coulee, Sask. on Friday. - Meteorites fell near Buzzard Coulee, Sask., about 40 kilometres southeast of Lloydminster [Google maps]

There, close to a frozen pond, numerous small rocks and pebbles could be seen that the scientists said were from the meteorite. No large chunks were spotted, however.

The fireball that streaked across western Canadian skies on Nov. 20 was witnessed by thousands. Researchers believe it was a 10-tonne fragment from an asteroid.

It was also captured on video by a number of people.

Reporters were told those observations, combined with the physical evidence, give scientists a treasure trove of data that could give them a better understanding of the solar system.

Man Teaches Robot To Play Pong

•December 2, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Robot Taunts Man. Man Foolishly Doesn’t Kill Robot.
Robot Kills Man! End of the World Stuff People!!!

One day perhaps; machines will contest man’s authority to live, but that machine won’t be this trivial, though formidable Robotic Pong Player:

“Pong: the robot edition”. This project shows an entertainment application based on Human-Robot Interaction, where the robot gives a new gaming dimension to that old-school arcade game.

Rather than playing alone, the human player faces now a robot, which reacts according to the state of the game. Through appropriate speech dialogs and gestures, it engages the user in a fierce but unfair competition. Indeed, all disturbing techniques, such as in-game speech are included.

Also Check Out:

Salvador DaBot – The Portraitist Robot

The Portraitist Robot recognizes human faces in its surroundings and extracts relevant characteristics from them [via integrated webcams]. By using its uncanny artistic talent, it then draws portraits of the participants from the captured images by converting them into vector art and by using inverse kinematics to control the robot’s arm.

Contours of the faces are first extracted from the images captured through the robot’s internal cameras. The contours are then converted to paths by organizing them with respect to their lengths.

Visit: Sylvain Calinon / Eric Sauser

Iggy Pop Lusts for Life – Interview

•December 1, 2008 • Leave a Comment

His new bandmates called him “Iguana,” a caustic reference to his stint with a mainstream act. Over time, the insulting nickname was shortened to “Iggy.”

“Once I got tagged with ‘Iggy,’ I had to figure out how to make it work,” he explains. “One day I was walking through the student union, and slumped over, sleeping in one of the booths, was Jim Pop, a friend of the extended Asheton gang—delinquents, basically. Jim Pop sniffed a lot of glue and lost his hair really early. And right then, I thought ‘Pop would work perfectly.’”

Iggy Pop

Read Interview Here: The Morning News

Daily Encouragement [8]

•December 1, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Know That Movie?

•December 1, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Pushpin Mario Mosiac

•December 1, 2008 • Leave a Comment

You know, sometimes you come across something that really makes you appreciate human ingenuity and dedication to a project. This isn’t really one of those; still crafty though:

Pin Mario

What you’re looking at it is a 17,000 push-pin mosaic mural, a product of three revisions and a total of two and a half semesters of work. The final revision took a whopping two months of work by the CIS Student Association at the University of the Fraser Valley, and it’s currently sitting in the Student Computing Center over there.

Pin Mario

17,000 push-pins, wow — impressive work! And, whether you like the piece or not, I think we can all agree that these kids should be expelled for ganking office supplies.

Visit: Flickr Gallery

Sapporo White Illumination [Japan]

•November 30, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Sapporo White Illumination

Sapporo White Illumination [28th Anniversary] is a big event which marks the coming of the snow season in the capital city of Japan’s northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido. Started in 1981, Sapporo White Illumination features romantic, artistic collaboration of nature and light after dark in the northern region, usually with the background of the white snow. Trees or objects d’art in Odori or main downtown areas light up the surroundings, making the snow-world even more mysterious and fascinating.

Trees and objects in Odori Park in Sapporo’s main downtown district are lit up from November 28th, 2008 [Fri] to January 4th, 2009 [Sun]

Here are some past year lights: [2007]

Visit: [Japanese Site] Sapporo White Illumination

Elyza – Book Crossing [F]

•November 30, 2008 • 1 Comment

After helping a relative move house today, I found myself bumming around under the beating sun and soon on the streets of Auckland city. The amount of rubbish on the road suggested the 75th anniversary Santa parade had finished. Gutted, as I missed the Bike Parade earlier this year as well. More parades, pass the petition!

Construction work had blocked off half of the Town Square, leading me to walk a direct path along the Town Hall Theatre building. I went and sat on the steps into Aotea Square, where I found this book: (6:57PM)

Elyza - Clare Darcy

Neat. A lost book, or so I thought. No less than a minute had the cleaners arrived; they would have biffed it for sure.

“Unfashionably outspoken, inconveniently rich, Elyza Leigh was a disaster in London high society. In despair she disguised herself as a boy, ran away – and fell into the arms of a devastating stranger who whirled her into the breathless gaiety of a Brighton Season. In return he asked her help in wooing the exquisite Corinna Mayfield. Elyza would have been delighted – had sh herself not already fallen in love with him…”

Elyza Clare Darcy

I don’t think I’ll get through reading it all by the time I start to get bored, say, mid December, so I will definitely post where I’m likely to leave this book when I’m done with it, OK. Of course I mean that optimistically in the hopes that this book isn’t a tedious read.

Today’s affair reminded me of The NeverEnding Story, you know the one:

“A boy who needs a friend finds a world that needs a hero in a land beyond imagination!”

The NeverEnding Story

I feel special! Bastian used to be my online alias… Yeah, I used to be cool. I also have the motion picture soundtrack and Limahl’s greatest hits on cassette tape… TMI huh?

This is the charismatic woman who left the book to fate:

Very Cool. Cheers.

Star Trek vs Star Wars

•November 30, 2008 • Leave a Comment

Darn Entertaining!

Daily Encouragement [7]

•November 28, 2008 • Leave a Comment

HYPERCUBE — Human Tetris With 3D Glasses

•November 28, 2008 • 2 Comments

Heard of Human Tetris? — A Japanese gameshow where contestants have to pass through unusual shapes in a moving wall — a funny segment on a Japanese variety show:

…Well, meet HYPERCUBE:

Super Hypercube

HYPERCUBE takes Tetris that extra step cooler, only it’s no joke — the experimental game by Canadian experimental games troupe Kokoromi, is based on a similar 3D premise. The object of the game is as follows:

You have a cluster of procedurally generated cubes right in front of you, and your goal is to quickly line it up to fit through the hole in the wall that’s moving toward you, by rotating the cluster with the controller.

playtest
That’s the human tetris part. The experimental games part comes in the game’s control scheme; you use a 360 controller, but also a pair of stereoscopic 3D glasses, which you can use to look around the game world and make sure you’ve got everything lined up just right.

The full, glasses-and-all version [called Super HYPERCUBE] is only really for show, but the team will also be releasing a Vanilla HYPERCUBE that just uses a 360 pad, so people like you and me can have a go.

Read Full Article: Offworld

Found In Space

•November 28, 2008 • Leave a Comment

The toolbag lost by astronaut Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper last week is quickly becoming the most famous piece of $100,000 junk floating around in space. In fact, countless nerds have pointed their telescopes into the night sky attempting to catch a glimpse of the backpack-sized bag orbiting the Earth.

At least one man has succeeded in this endeavor—and he managed to capture it on video to boot:

Hmm, Categorize under – F U N N Y : J U N K – GET IT!?!
[because it’s space junk and it’s funny… no?]