Secret Still

The long awaited (at least by me) day has finally arrived! Hell yes I am using that exclamation point, because Firefox 3 is finally upon us. All Opera, Safari, and *shudder* IE users take notice: your browser are belong to us. You no longer need to suffer behind the working of a web browser that thinks pop-ups are candy. You can have a browser that integrates thousands of handy plug-ins created by its vast open source community. Get your shit together and download Firefox 3 today. Don’t sleep on this. If you download today you can help them try to set the world record for downloads in a single day. A great browser and a place in history. Your life will probably never mean more than that.

Firefox 3

Evan Roth is like the Richard Feynman of interaction and street art. Everything he does is open source. Everything he does turns the traditional idea of something on its side. He co-founded the Graffiti Research Lab if that will help you understand how gigantic his innovations are. My favorite part of any of his experiments/projects is that he wants to put them in all of our hands. Open source is the watchword. What makes him like Feynman even more is that he never settles on being great at one thing. His work is constantly moving into different arenas, mediums, ideas, and locations. It’s the process of dreaming up an idea and then making it a reality regardless of whether or not you have the skills to creat it already. People like this are unstoppable forces of change. I’m just glad he’s on our side.

Evan Roth

*Update*

Evan and the GRL project are featured today in an episode of Boing Boing TV that you can watch here. You can also find it in today’s Daily Videos.

It was brought to my attention that some of you, and you know who you are, skip over the science and technology posts that I write. Too bad for you, because The Girl sent me a great link this morning to The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. What does this organization do, what are they about? Making humans smarter through the use of technology. Simple. But read their overview and you’ll realize that it’s a little bit more complex. I wonder if their hiring. That would be a pretty sweet gig, thinking about the philosophy of AI.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Scientists have recently created the darkest material on Earth, a material that absorbs 99.9 percent of light. The key is to understand that it doesn’t reflect any light, but it also absorbs a lot of light. Both are important to make the darkest material. This new guy is made of carbon nano-tubes, all standing on end, and with irregular exposed surfaces. It’s 30 times darker than the current standard for blackness. The only thing you can see when you stare into this new dark is the reflection of your own soul looking back. Sorry, all the talk about blackness got me feeling a little goth.

The New Black

Warren Ellis drops the Three Laws of Robotics as written by robots instead of humans. Hilarious. It’s good to know that they hate us since they’re already in our blood. Now we wait for our mechanical overlords to kill us in our sleep.

Three Laws of Robotics

Leave it to Stanford to blow my mind so early in the morning. Those darling, little geniuses have created an online tool called Vector Magic that will create a vector from JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, or TIFF files. It can output to EPS, SVG, or PNG. If all those things mean nothing to you then go the hell away. The best part of the whole thing is that it’s free! No longer will haggard designers have to spend the better part of their day tracing some stupid product image to turn it into a usable vector. Illustrator CS3 has a pretty advanced trace tool, but for those of us who don’t spend all day in Illustrator it can be pretty daunting, sometimes impossible, to get the image to vectorize properly. Stanford’s tool is fairly customizable and seems to hold up well against images of varying color and complexity. To give you a nice example the image for this post is a vectorized version of the image from the previous post, created with Stanford’s tool in about 32 seconds.

Vector Magic

MPK Co. has created tiny, light-emitting, glass spheres that last up to 12 years. They’re filled with a radioactive gas, but the radiation doesn’t penetrate the glass walls of the spheres. It’s not effected by heat or cold, and is 5,000lbs crush resistant. Cost to light up an 8.5 x 11 piece of plastic: .35 cents.

Litroenergy profile

I’m pretty sure that the best part about having a kid, better than all the love and milestones and blah blah blah, will be getting to buy and read kids books. I love kids books. Almost as much as I love cake. Kids mean more cake, too. Basically kids are the answer to happiness for me but not in a loving them way, more in a getting what I want way. The internet, in an obvious attempt to stop me from reproducing, has come up with a new site called LookyBook. The site features hundreds of children’s picture books from cover to cover, both new and old, making it easy for parents to decide which books they’d like to get for their child. It comes with all of the usual bells and whistles including a favorites list (bookshelf), sharing, purchasing (Amazon and Barnes & Noble), as well as embedding the flash book on a website (you might have noticed). It’s nice to know that the internet wants to keep me from having kids. I’m warning it though, I’ll replace The Girl’s pills with aspirin if there isn’t a free cake delivery site up and running in the next few months. Consider yourself warned.

LookyBook

Can reduce emissions from the train by as much as 50%! Nice. If it wasn’t too little, too late from a polluting behemoth I would be really happy. It’s still a nice project.

Hybrid Locomotive.

Indiana University has a gigantic digital archive of photos taken by Charles W. Cushman in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. As someone who worked on a digital archiving project for a state university: I feel their pain. I also really appreciate what they’re doing. These photos are great and I’m glad they’ve been preserved and shared with a much larger audience. Nice job on the metadata, too.

Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection