[E.O.M.S.]

Saturday, 27 March 2010

When Pong gets in your eyes...

It appears that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are all one step behind the students of Imperial College London...

University students have developed a computer game that is operated by eye movements, which could allow people with severe physical disabilities to become 'gamers' for the first time, they announce today.

The students, from Imperial College London, have adapted an open source game called 'Pong', where a player moves a bat to hit a ball as it bounces around the screen. The adaptation enables the player to move the bat using their eye.

To play the game, the user wears special glasses containing an infrared light and a webcam that records the movement of one eye.

The webcam is linked to a laptop where a computer program syncs the player's eye movements to the game.

The prototype game is very simple but the students believe that the technology behind it could be adapted to create more sophisticated games and applications such as wheelchairs and computer cursors controlled by eye movements.

One of the major benefits of the new technology is that it is inexpensive, using off-the-shelf hardware and costing approximately £25 to make.

@'ScienceBlogs'

'In Sorrow's Grace' by Sara Tritt

This piece by Award Winning British poet

Sara Tritt has been slated for inclusion in Angela Bowie's forthcoming anthology 'AIDS Begone'

'In Sorrow's Grace'

It was dawn

Beautiful, and quiet

You lay your head

Against my chest

And hummed out

My heartbeat

I love you

I still love you…

I wish you would

Wake up

And smile

There were shadows

On the snow

Do you remember?

The day you packed your bags

That test we all took

From time to time

Just a formality

Suddenly formed

Black clouds

I unpacked your clothes

And kissed your tears away

You took my hand…

We will be together

In another world

Perhaps we

Already are

All the seas

Could not wash away

The sterile, clinical smell

From our clothes

Our hair

They all stared

Let them you smiled

And squeezed my hand

You did not belong

To your disease

You were mine

Until it took you from me

I love you

I still love you.

Hey! Here comes the flow...

Dark matter, dark energy and now dark flow: it seems we live in an increasingly darker universe, and the current teen fascination with vampires has nothing to do with it!

In 2008 scientists reported the discovery of hundreds of galaxy clusters streaming in the same direction at more than 2.2 million miles (3.6 million kilometers) an hour.

This mysterious motion can't be explained by current models for distribution of mass in the universe. So the researchers made the controversial suggestion that the clusters are being tugged on by the gravity of matter outside the known universe.

Now the same team has found that the dark flow extends even deeper into the universe than previously reported: out to at least 2.5 billion light-years from Earth.

John Roach @'National Geographic'

Here's the original paper in pdf:

A measurement of large-scale peculiar velocities of clusters of galaxies: results and cosmological implications.

In the bunker...

When Legends Gather #588

Fox relentlessly hyped Cantor's lie

As you probably know by now, yesterday Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, falsely claimed to the national press corps that his campaign office had been targeted by a gunman in the wake of Sunday's health care reform vote.

Here's a video showing Cantor's claim, explaining why it was false, and documenting Fox's breathless promotion of the tale:

Here's a bit more detail on what happened: an office in the same building where Cantor has an office (it's unmarked and not in his district) was hit by a bullet that had been randomly fired skyward. The bullet could easily have been fired a half-mile away, but even setting that aside, the fact that Cantor had an office in the building was not widely known (it's not listed on his website). Anyone actually targeting Cantor would have picked a different location.

Cantor's tale was an an obvious attempt to give the national media a "Fair & Balanced" narrative that both sides are doing it when it comes to threats of political violence. But that narrative is not true. So Cantor simply lied. Made it up. Saw himself some Tuzla sniper fire. Carved a virtual backwards B into his cheek.

He abandoned any pretense to honesty and accuracy, and demonstrated his utter contempt for the national media by crying wolf straight to their face. And Fox ate it up and spit it right back out at their audience, completely, wholeheartedly, and absolutely uncritically.

Just as Eric Cantor is a liar, this incident shows (yet again) that the crew at Fox News are not journalists.

Jed Lewison @'Daily Kos'

Happy Birthday Mum!

The worst thing is that I have absolutely no idea how old my Mum would have been...

If the future is watching, this is it!

Dudes from the future! If we're about to annihilate ourselves, next monday would be a good time to stop us... (Come to think of it, if the LHC does indeed destroy us, who's trying to stop us from the future? The surviving roaches? But why would they do that? Seems to me it benefits them? There has to be some more nefarious plot at work here...)

CERN announced that on March 30 they will attempt to circulate beams in the Large Hadron Collider at 3.5 TeV, the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator. A live webcast will be shown of the event, and will include live footage from the control rooms for the LHC accelerator and all four LHC experiment, as well as a press conference after the first collisions are announced.

“With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we’re on the verge of launching the LHC physics program,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “But we’ve still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself: it’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”

Nancy Atkinson @'UniverseToday'

Meanwhile, here's some light music to entertain. Alpine Kat, and her Large Hadron Rap comes from the very heart of the LHC, since in her day job, she's Katherine McAlpine, journalist and webmaster for the Atlas experiment.

Holy mother of...

Miles Davis by Jim Marshall

REpost: I Murder Hate

A few years back Adrian Sherwood and Doug Aubrey's worlds met and mixed somewhere in North London. A shared interest in noise, silence and a mutual hearing loss, caused by Bombs, Drum and Bass, led the Godfather of dub and Aubrey starting to talk about trying to make a film together...Aided by a few fellow conspirators from On-U-sounds world: Ghetto Priest, Doug Wimbush, Mark Stewart and a passing cat, they produced a short never seen video...until now. The dubmaster and the filmmaker again met recently in Edinburgh and at Graham Fagan's fantastic 'I Murder Hate' event in Stirling and there's now rumour of a major film collaboration for the 30th anniversary of the seminal On-U-sounds in 2011, which will form part of a DvD box set, a work for cinema and who knows even television...? Enjoy !

Via '38 Minutes'
Bonus audio:
'Auld Lang Syne/The Slave's Lament & I Murder Hate'
Ghetto Priest, Skip McDonald, Pete Lockett & Ian King mixed live by Adrian Sherwood.
Live at The Tolbooth, Stirling, Scotland 14th March 2009.
HERE

Friday, 26 March 2010

Remember...

Me want...

If I told you that a brand new analog synthesizer existed that costed about the price of a couple cases of beer and was small enough to fit in your coat pocket, I would probably be laughed out of this century. However, Korg seems to think differently, and just announced the Monotron, which is precisely this. Operating as an analog synthesizer the utilizes a ribbon touch surface for the keys, this thing borrows technology that was derived directly from their classic MS-20 synthesizer from the 1990s. The Monotron has nothing more than your basic, everyday controls. It utilizes a single oscillator, one filter, and one LFO which modulates the oscillator signal (essentially, for non-synth people, it uses a waveform to automate it’s volume over a span of time). It also includes an auxiliary input which you can hook anything from an iPod to a Kaoss Pad to even another synth to further mangle up the sound with, and the headphone jack doubles as the line out, allowing you to easily hook up to an amp or recording device.

Although there are other modular analog synth kits out there that are also about as cheap as the Monotron, this package is great for beginners or people looking to tweak sounds without having to fuss with cables or learning curves. More info on Korg’s website.

@'Bean Town Boogie Down'