brainwagon

Via Ars Technica is the announcement that many films from the National Archives will be made available via Google Video.  Their pilot program had 104 videos, consisting of many newreel clips from WWII, documentaries about the formation of the national parks service, and documentaries from Nasa including the 1969 documentary The Eagle Has Landed, documenting the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon.   Good stuff.

[tags]Google Video,National Archives,Public Domain[/tags]

Juan Buhler (former SIGGRAPH sketch chair, current Pixarian, and cool street photographer) sent me a link to his cool idea for using the video ipod to store maps. He realized that the thumbnail viewer in his iPod video displays six thumbnails in each row of his video iPod, so he stitched together a map of San Francisco from Google Maps that was 6 times the native screen resolution of the video iPod, (6×320=1920).   He then used the Python imaging toolkit to break the big map up into columns of six pictures using the Python Imaging Library, and loaded them onto his video iPod.  Now, he can quickly scroll through the map of San Francisco, and bring up individual maps at the native resolution.

What a cool idea!

Addendum: I did something kind of similar a couple of years ago with Python and the Terraserver.  You could basically convert latitude and longitude into a collection of urls, and then download the tiles from the Microsoft Terraserver and stitch them together, allowing you to create pictures like this one of San Francisco.

[tags]iPod Hack,Juan Buhler,Google Maps,Google Maps Hack[/tags]

Courtesy of Bill Gurstelle’s Technology Underground, check out the U.S. Navy’s collection of paintings of nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll. Very cool stuff.

[tags]Nuclear Explosion, Art, Navy, Bikini Atoll[/tags]

Addendum: I bet I would have gotten more traffic to my website if I used the tag Bikini instead of Bikini Atoll.

I’m just passing along a link from Eric’s email to me today: 3D Painted Rooms - 2Loop.com

These rooms are painted so that, when looked at right, optical illusions will appear. Very cool.

I especially like the second to last one.

Feel the need to lob tennis balls at those who oppose you? Try checking out these rather nice plans for a small trebuchet. With such a mighty seige engine, none dare oppose your military might!

Seriously though, these things are:

• interesting mechanical devices
• fun to play with
• and excellent for tossing water balloons.

Unless of course, you get hurt, in which case you didn’t hear it from me.

[tags]Trebuchet[/tags]

I remember seeing some of these Rube Goldberg devices setup using the Halflife 2 physics engine before, but not many are this elaborate and complicated. There are some really good bits inside.

HL2 Rube Goldberg Device: Reloaded - Google Video

[tags]Google Video,Halflife 2[/tags]

Find out how popular your name has been over the years.  “Mark” seems to have peaked in popularity in the 1960s, while my dad’s name “Vernon” probably peaked back in 1918, and now is all but extinct.  Forget about some of my other uncles names: like Clarence, Virgil (never really popular, even in its heyday) and Merle.  My uncle Wayne would have scored highly, but even his name is, well, on the wane.  Overall, diversity of first names seems to have been declining steadily since the 1950s.   Interesting.
[via Flutterby!]

Need I really say more? An implementation of Babbages Difference Engine, capable of evaluating 2nd and 3rd order polynomials with two or three digits of precision. Needs some video demonstrating it in operation, but wow.

Bonus links:

• Wikipedia entry on the Difference Engine
• Difference Engine in Meccano
• A nice description of the Difference Engine, with some animations
  
• A fictional book by Gibson and Sterling that I didn’t like…

Double bonus: my favorite Babbage quotation

On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Triple bonus coverage: The British Museum of Science and Industry manual on setting up their Difference Engine to do real calculations.
[tags]Lego,Babbage[/tags]

Overall, I didn’t think much of the commercials that played during this years Superbowl, but just in case you missed one that everyone seems to be talking about during your coffee break, you can surf on over to Google Video and see what you missed.

Super Bowl XL Commercials on Google Video

[tags]Superbowl Commercials,Google Video[/tags]

I beat Josh by a single point, which probably will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me.

Courtesy of the Make Blog, go surf over and check out these instructions for building your own projection digital clock.  The idea is pretty simple: modify a  cheap digital watch from the dollar store by mounting a couple of bright LED lights behind the LCD display, and then use a lens to focus the enlarged version on the wall/ceiling.  Neat!

The author,  Raphael Assénat, has lots of other cool projects as well: of particular interest to me was his neat article on extracting the sound hardware from a Super Nintendo and wiring it to his PC.  I’m gonna have to keep an eye out for one of these at Goodwill.   Cool stuff.

[tags]Hacks,Make,Hardware,Super Nintendo,Clock[/tags]

I saw some of these little cars while in Paris, and of course wondered what they would be like in collisions. Check out the video of a little Smart Car mashing into a barrier at 70mph.

Smart - Google Video

[tags]Google Video,Smart Car,Collision[/tags]

If you haven’t mastered the cool Japanese way of folding T-shirts, you could always watch this video (complete with Nintendo soundtrack) on making a jig out of cardboard to help out.

Formidable!

I must admit: I love sushi.  Even basic nigiri and sashimi show a degree of concentration that we don’t often see in the west.   Precision.  Freshness.  Balance.  Everytime I have a meal of good sushi, I can’t help but feel better.  The flavors of fish, rice, soy, wasabi and gari are all just… I love it.  I’ve grown to appreciate it so much that it now seems very strange to cook certain fish like salmon.

That being said, I’m no expert: I’ve never been to Japan and the only Japanese words I know come from menus.   But like most things, the more you know, the more you enjoy the subtlety of it all, so I’ll just provide this link to the informative and useful Sushi Eating HOWTO.

Nice notes on building a panoramic video system.  It hooks six firewire webcams together to record full motion video over 360 degrees.    Neat!

[tags]Panorama,Quicktime,Webcam[/tags]