So, this is a preview of a piece of software which I find to be absolutely ridiculous.
I had not thought that anyone had actually been able to program an algorithm to do this as well as this.
Here, we have a program which allows you to do very rough sketches of an image, say a beach with some birds, sailboats, and a newly wed couple kissing. Very rough sketch.
Well, this program takes your rough sketch and keywords for each object and runs them through image searches online and *builds a composite image of it.* In other words, it outputs a “photoshopped” image composite of what you had sketched.
All fine and good, it sounds relatively meh on paper. However take a look at these images and you will be astounded at how real the final picture seems, especially when compared to what it was extracted from.
Check out their university research page which has more ridiculous images made by Sketch2Photo, as well as the source code of the program itself!
Well, I know things are getting small and all….and nanotubes are getting funding like theres no tomorrow…but really, this is just ridiculous. Berkeley has developed a single nanotube that acts as the antenna, tuner, amplifier, AND demodulator of a radio. It captures signal by mehanical vibration instead of the usual method since its so damn small. Whats very cool is that its got perfectly acceptable quality sound. To demo this, they attached the nanotube onto an electrode. Somehow, through the magic that is carbon nanotube, it transmits the sound as an electric current. There are some awesome pictures and videos of the nanotube in action, along with some audio samplings. Check it out: Nanotube Radio
Funny…Comcast High Speed internet is slowly throttling their bandwidth, cutting off their customers slowly, have crappy customer service, and what do they do?
Lets install a super high def video demo at our HQ of 10 million pixels and let the 1 person who walks in marvel at our awesomness 😛
But, enough with that, Comcast installed this “screen” of 10 million LEDS at their headquarters and demonstrates super HD video quality.
It includes an automated video room that handles the 27 terabytes of video that is required to fully use the thing.
Check it out at DVICE
I present to you a very well done flash animation depicting an epic war between your desktop icons. Granted, it uses some older icons, but really, its a good piece of animation. Hope you all enjoy Icon War
So, I know theres been quite a few lists of demotivation posters, and I just want to contribute some that I have found to be especially funny or striking. A lot of these came from sites that made flash slideshows, and so here, I provide the actual image file in case you people want to keep a set on your own harddrive 😛
Check it out: Flashladybug Demotivation Poster Collection
Here is a nifty tool that you normally wouldn’t just think of.
You know of those programs that convert powerpoints into flash files so their portable anywhere? Well, heres a program that converts audio and video to an executable that will work on any pc, sadly, mac is not supported.
There is a PRO version, that lets you set bitrates, etc, the free version uses a default bitrate which is likely lower quality. However, for normal applications, a quick conversion, this is a nice little addition to the already quite large toolbox 😛
Check it out: a2e
No….it doesn’t remove all the noise that you hear while you’re trying to concentrate, although that would be REALLY nice.
This little program removes digital noise from photographs. This is really obvious when you’re either taking a photograph at high zoom (when camera starts digital extrapolating) or when you’re taking photos at night and you have a high ISO on. Its all the little red and yellow dots that appear over the image. This program learns as it fixes noise and removes it to provide a much cleaner image. Now…sadly, this thing is one of the few programs that is posted at flashladybug that…isn’t free 🙁
However, you can clear up a few photos using the trial edition which is for 15 days, or buy the full version for 20 bucks. Still kind of sad that it isn’t free. I had expected the standard edition to be free and the profession ed to be paid…but such is not the case.
Check it out: Imagenomic
In a slightly random departure of our normally scheduled/planned tech news…we broach upon…food.
I understand that El Bulli has been out there for years, but this is the first time I personally have heard of this restaurant. Of course, it would help that I am not in habit of regularly checking world-renowned restaurants…but…
El Bulli is a restaurant in Catalonia, Spain. Its a very small restaurant. It only serves 8000 people a season. With a small catch. More than 800,000 want to be served. What’s special about this place? Well…its run by Ferran Adria, who is perhaps the best chef out there, and probably a genius. Food genius 🙂
What they do is innovate on food. Instead of making, say, extremely good pork chops, or any particularly good “normal” food, they and i quote “deconstruct” popular dishes and remake them.
Each season, they create a new course list and last years menu included, snow balls that were stuffed with strawberries, tangerine/carrot whipped fluff, and other interesting things that I just really can’t describe.
For this….check out the video: El Bulli on Youtube
Also…despite the overwhelming popularity of the restaurant, Adria continues to run at a loss, for the 8th year in a row, with cost per diner at exactly 250 euros. Hey…if you can get a spot…250 euros isnt that bad for a 30 course dinner that spans 4 hours 😉
So, there’s graffiti, and then theres graffiti. You have the interesting things that people put on the walls, and then you have random scribbles. We now bring you a different class of graffiti.
Behold…graffiti that contains “Born to be root”, “Loading Please Wait”, and, a printer that paints on sidewalks?
After the jump, theres a small gallery of true geek style graffiti, and then a new approach. This new approach uses a “printer” like device to print graffiti. This can print it on the roads using washable paint, or on walls. It’s an interesting little piece of hardware, check it out at Web Urbanist
A bit of science for us all. TEAM 0.5 has debuted. What is TEAM? Its the worlds most powerful transmission electron microscope. It gives images with .5 angstrom resolutions, which just so happens to be half the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. It’s located at NCEM at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. THey hope to setup a control room that shows the sample on a screen that looks like an HD flatscreen. 🙂 As of now, their opening date for outside users, is October 08. It corrects for a aberration that has long plagued such high res microscopes that make points of light look like disks. Fixing this has upped the resolution greatly. As of now, they can perform spectroscopy on one atom at a time, which allows scientists to precisely locate impurities of 1 atom per sample.
Here…is a mindblowing example:
Shown here is a gold crystal bridge. Those dots…..those are gold atoms
Thanks Eurekalert, and congrats to the folks at NCEM
