Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Mar

02

Listen to David Bowie's First Album in 10 Years for Free Online (Legally)

Label: Technology

You don’t have to wait until March 12 to find out whether David Bowie’s first album in a decade is more Tin Machine than Low; the long-awaited The Next Day is already available, streaming in full on iTunes for a limited period pre-release.The stream continues Bowie’s current interest in previewing content from the album for free online before release; videos for both...

Mar

01

Crowdsourced 'Maker Map' Charts Nearby Hackerspaces and Hardware Shops

Label: Technology

We’ve long been fascinated with makerspaces, the DIY equivalent of co-ops. They make projects possible by offering tools and classes at a shared cost to those who otherwise wouldn’t have access. If you’re lucky enough to live in a maker-dense region, you’ve likely got plenty of options, from niche shops like the Bike Kitchen to multi-use spaces like TechShop.San Francisco is one such locale,...

Feb

28

Rodent Mind Meld: Scientists Wire Two Rats' Brains Together

Label: Technology

It’s not exactly a Vulcan mind meld, but it’s not far off. Scientists have wired the brains of two rats together and shown that signals from one rat’s brain can help the second rat solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve.The rats were in different cages with no way to communicate other than through the electrodes implanted in their brains. The transfer of information...

Feb

27

Doctors Supercharge Their iPads With Box.net

Label: Technology

Doctors love their iPads — even more than you might think.Over in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a group of more than 60 doctors have revamped their mobile phones and iPads for use in emergency departments across the region with a little help from a familiar application: the popular Box.net file-sharing services. Using Box, they’ve built a new system that lets them share procedures, journal...

Feb

26

The Court of Public Opinion Is About Mob Justice and Reputation as Revenge

Label: Technology

Recently, Elon Musk and The New York Times took to Twitter and the internet to argue the data – and their grievances — over a failed road test and car review. Meanwhile, an Applebee’s server is part of a Change.org petition to get her job back after posting a pastor’s no-tip receipt comment online. And when he wasn’t paid quickly enough, a local Fitness SF web developer rewrote...

Feb

25

Amazon May Seem Unstoppable, But Google Is Powering the Counterattack

Label: Technology

Back in 1990, other stores still had a chance against Walmart. As recalled in Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart Effect, a great history of the rise of the retail giant, it was that year when Walmart surpassed Kmart in sales. It wasn’t until 1992 that Walmart sold more than Sears. But by 2011, Walmart had higher sales worldwide than the combined total sales of the next six biggest retailers: Kroger,...

Feb

24

Wired Space Photo of the Day: Glowing Gas in Omega Nebula

Label: Technology

This image is a colour composite of the Omega Nebula (M 17) made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximatelly 4.7 x 3.7 degrees. Image: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin. [high-resolution]Caption: ...

Feb

23

That Syncing Feeling

Label: Technology

“Smart, or stylish?” That’s the question facing casual watch aficionados looking for a new, high-tech addition to their collection.On one hand (er, wrist), you’ve got the Pebble and other smartwatch upstarts, which come with built-in smartphone connectivity, customizable screens, and burgeoning developer communities eager to feed their app ecosystems. They also, by and large, look like uninspired...

Feb

22

Good Lookin' Out

Label: Technology

The other strap-it-on-and-get-rad cameras out there — the GoPros and the Contours and the Ions — are all pretty sick in their own right. But for ease of use, no camera is sicker than Drift Action’s HD Ghost cam.It has enough capability and pure oomph to keep up with the competition — it captures 1080p at 30fps and 720p at 60fps, and it can talk to your other devices via Wi-Fi — but it also...

Feb

21

Pinterest Gets a Billion-Dollar Bump, Pins More Cash to Its Boards

Label: Technology

Everyone’s favorite online discovery site Pinterest has raised yet another round of funding, $200 million from San Francisco firm Valiant Capital Partners, the company confirmed Wednesday. Existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital also participated. The massive round – twice as much as Pinterest’s last VC infusion of $100 million – values...

Feb

20

Turkish Soccer Fans Roar Loudly Enough to Damage Your Ears

Label: Technology

ISTANBUL, Turkey — The Turks, who love football as much as anyone, have the loudest fans on earth.The 51,998 people packed into Turk Telekon Arena, home to the Galatasaray football club, let out a 131.76-decibel roar during a match against Fenerbahçe two years ago, enough to secure a spot in the Guinness book of records. That’s louder than The Who during their 126-decibel gig in London in...

Feb

19

Same-Day Delivery Darling Shutl Takes on Amazon's Ground Game

Label: Technology

Imagine ordering something online, but instead of the store telling you when your package will arrive, you tell them. A few million U.S. residents will soon have that option as same-day delivery darling Shutl prepares for its stateside launch within about a month.The U.K.-based company has already received a lot of love from startup watchers and investors, including UPS, which has put $2 million...

Feb

18

Pondering the Point of Snow Bikes While Riding With Wolves

Label: Technology

Three Fat Amigos! The green one is a Surly Krampus and runs an even larger 29r wheel size. The orange and blue are Salsa Mukluks and this is the park bench stop on Adams Gulch in Sun Valley. We reached this in an unusually hard effort, 'cause behind us were the wolves.
Hitting the trail on a bike made for it... provided the trail is wide, the terrain is reasonable and you aren't in a hurry.
Seen through our Rolling Huts cabin window in the Methow Valley, the Mukluk awaits another ride.
Hunter orange is easy to spot on the trail in the snow, and this bike was ridden on Sun Valley's famous single track. Riding on the cross-country trails is not permitted there like at the Methow.
It was about 2 degrees on this ride and layered like that kid in A Christmas Story. Seen here are REI's Winterflyte jacket and tights. Underneath there's an eVent shell and under that Merino wool liners from ibex.
A big, fat tire that grips and doesn't damage the groomed trail. The blue spots on the rim are from the rim strip that's poking out through drilled out holes. Drilling out the rim removes considerable weight. A Fat Bike rim is essentially two MTB rims welded together.
Rode the 9 Zero 7 over hill and dale on groomed trails in the Methow Valley at about 9 mph. Once on a downhill, hit 12, and it's super fun to ride where you normally can't, even if it's at a tourist pace.

KETCHUM, Idaho – Snow bikes are good for hucking about on groomed trails. They are not good for outrunning wolves.This became obvious as a group of us, dressed in garish red Lycra suits and riding black, orange and DayGlo-green bikes with cartoonishly large tires, pedaled frantically through the snow after a trio of wolves caught our scent.The experience made me ponder the point of these bikes, and the questions those building them must answer if snow biking is to catch on. It isn’t as if people often see apex predators when riding. But my encounter with canis lupus highlighted the shortcomings of bikes that are a hell of a lot of fun but struggling to find their place.Snow bikes are, of course, designed to ride over snow. Fat, cushy tires pumped to a whopping 5 PSI keep you from sinking. Garage tinkerers in Alaska and other cold climes have been building them forever, welding mountain bike rims together to double up on tires and fashioning frames to straddle them. The DIY ethos went corporate a few years ago when industry juggernaut Quality Bicycle Products joined the party.Although snow bikes remain one of the most esoteric niches in cycling, they are slowly entering the mainstream. A dozen manufactures are making them, as are independent craft builders. There was a Fat Bike Summit last month, where folks got together to talk about land use and access for the bikes. There are some 10,000 snow bikes in the wild, and that number’s expected to double within a year. And the Iditabike, the famous riff on Alaska’s epic Iditarod dogsled race, begins later this month in Anchorage. Yet as the scene gains participants, especially roadies and mountain bikers who already have a bike or three in the garage, expectations increase. And frankly, snow bikes have a long way to go before they approach the sophistication of a Pivot 5.7, Specialized Stumpjumper, or Jamis Dakar 650b. At this point, the bikes have more in common with beach cruisers than proper mountain bikes.Don’t get me wrong; riding in the snow is a hoot, because, well, you’re riding in snow. But trudging along at less than 10 mph wears thin after 45 minutes. Snow biking feels like a sport that hasn’t figured out what it wants to do yet, much like mountain biking in the days when crazy Californians bombed down Mount Tam on bikes they’d built themselves.It’s one thing to ride groomed trails and quite another to scramble up a single track. Fat tires require fat frames, which lack the handling and agility of modern mountain bikes. The bikes are clumsy and, at about 35 pounds, heavy. Trigger shifters are endlessly frustrating when you’re wearing gloves. And riding an 8-inch single track on a 5-inch tire requires exceptional concentration and balance. Bobble your line and you’re off the trail, half-buried in powder. So you bounce along at little more than walking speed, trying to be smooth and find a flow. It’s best to settle in and enjoy the ride. With so much resistance working against your forward momentum, it’s quite an effort to get anywhere. Before hitting Sun Valley, we rode the Methow Valley. Both resorts are interested in buying fleets of snow bikes to draw well-heeled vacationers to underutilized trails. It’s easy enough to design bikes that roll over groomed snow trails at single-digit speeds, but it isn’t enough to sustain the scene, especially when you consider these machines cost $1,500 to $3,500.Snow bikes will never replace dedicated single-track or cross-country machines, but if the industry wants them to be anything more than a fad, they’ll have to go faster, shift better, ride stiffer and weigh a lot less. We’d like to see dropper seat posts, internal gears and the ability to adjust tire pressure on the fly, to start. People made the same complaints about mountain biking back in the day, and look where the sport’s gone. The same thing could happen to snow biking as another generation of builders and tinkerers pushes this budding sport forward — or falls to the wolves.Photos: DL Byron/WiredcreateSummaryAndThumb("summary900203294496481042");Read More..

Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Ancient Water Flows on Mars

Label: Technology

High-Resolution Stereo Camera nadir and colour channel data taken during revolution 11497 on 13 January 2013 by ESA’s Mars Express have been combined to form a natural-colour view of the region southeast of Amenthes Planum and north of Hesperia Planum. The region imaged, which lies to the west of Tinto Vallis and Palos crater, is centred at around 3°S and 109°E, and has a ground resolution of about 22 m per pixel.

The image features craters, lava channels and a valley from which water may have once flowed. Dark wind-blown sediments fill the valleys and the floors of the craters.

Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) [high-resolution]

Caption: ESA

The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California

Label: Technology

Team Truckee entered the competition late, after Team Russia was unable to get visas in time. Their sculpture: "Rising Tide."

The weekend at Northstar ski resort in Truckee, California, is beautiful, sunny, and in the 30s. For eight teams of snow carvers from around the world, though, it’s terrible — the melty snow is sloppy, hard to carve, and even dangerous.

Teams of three from Finland, Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. were selected from more than 40 applicants for the inaugural Carve Tahoe, a five-day competition to hew works of art from 14-foot-high, 20-ton blocks of snow. But despite the bad snow, the teams rely on decades of experience, handcrafted tools, and creative techniques to fashion their massive sculptures. The team members are sculptors and artists and designers, but also doctors and lawyers. Though they spend weeks each year carving, nobody makes a living doing it.

“Everyone seems to have their own method of doing things,” says Team Wisconsin’s Mark Hargarten. “It’s amazing how different they are.”

The Wisconsin team uses a grid system for their carving — a Native American wearing an eagle costume, its feathers turning to flames, called “Dance of the Firebird.” The polyurethane model they built is scaled so 1/2 inch equals one foot on the finished snow sculpture. They cut a copy of the model in four, and covered each section with clay, sectioned in 1/2 inch increments. They etch corresponding lines in the snow, one foot to a side, and they peel off one piece of clay, carve the part of the sculpture they can see, and move on to the next.

“You never get lost using the method,” says Dan Ingebrigtson, a professional sculptor from Milwaukee. “Three or four guys can work from different angles, and meet in the middle.”

Wisconsin’s got several other strategies behind their carving as well. From the south, it looks like they haven’t even started; they left the southern side of the block intact to protect the rest of it from the sun, and the wall has been decimated by the heat. More than 20 percent of its thickness has melted by Sunday night, three days in. After the sun goes down, the team is hollowing out the interior of the structure, so it will freeze faster overnight.

Other teams are relying on nighttime freezing as well. A team partly from the U.S. and partly from Canada carves spires from blocks they removed from the sculpture, and plans to attach them to the top of their sculpture, “The Stand,” which incorporates four interwoven trees. They’ll use melty snow pulled from the middle of the block right when the sun goes down to cement the tops onto the trees, says team member Bob Fulks from the top of a stepladder as he cuts away at the sculpture with an ice chisel.

Fulks’ team is leaving Tahoe after the competition to go straight to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, for another competition, where he anticipates no problems with warm weather.

“It’s a good gig, you can travel all over the world doing it,” he says. “You go around and see the same people.”

Many of the carvers know each other from previous competitions.

“We’ve sculpted with almost everybody here before,” says Team Idaho-Dunham’s Mariah Dunham, who is working on “Sweet House (of Madness)” with her mother, Barb. The creation is a beehive, with the south side as the exterior, and the north side (intentionally placed out of the sun) as a representation of the comb, including hexagonal holds that perforate all the way to the hollow interior.

Though Carve Tahoe is new, snow carving is not. Many of the sculptors have been at it for more than 20 years, traveling around the world and meeting and competing against many of the same people — though each competition demands unique new designs from all the sculptors. Kathryn Keown discovered snow carving while Googling something completely different, and decided she wanted to host an international event.

“First we fell in love with the sculptures, then we fell in love with the sculptors,” says Keown, who founded the competition with Hub Strategy, the ad agency where she works.

Keown contacted several ski areas before Northstar, but the resort was on board right away; its owner, Vail Resorts also owns Breckenridge, where one of the biggest and most prestigious snow carving competitions is held.

But Keown wanted to commit to the design of the competition, not just the sculptures. Applicants submitted their designs last summer, and Keown enlisted Lawrence Noble, chair of the School of Fine Art at the Academy of Art University to help choose modern, complex, realist designs. She wanted no artsy, kitschy snowmen.

Then she chose a design-friendly logo and judges. In addition to Noble, the panel of judges features a sushi chef from Northstar, two interior designers, a photographer from nearby Squaw Valley, and Bryan Hyneck, vice president of design at Speck, which makes cases for mobile devices and was one of the event’s sponsors.

“The level of complexity and sophistication in this type of sculpture is just amazing,” says Hyneck, who has judged industrial and graphic design competitions, but never snow carving. “It’s amazing how organic some of the shapes can be.”

As a judge, Hyneck says he’ll focus on the craft and the execution of the sculptures, and how the sculptors use particular techniques to take advantage of the snow’s properties. But he adds that subject matter, point of view, message, and relationship to a theme are all important points as well.

“Anybody that is really going to push the limits of the capabilities of the media is going to get a lot of my attention,” he says.

For some, like the Germans, that means suspending massive structures made completely of snow. Their sculpture, titled “Four Elements”, features four large spires encircled by a tilted disc. Despite a trickle of melted snow dripping off the bottom edge, one — or even two — of the German carvers frequently stand atop the sculpture, using saws or chisels to shape the towers.

Sunday evening, after the sun has gone down and the temperature dropped, Josh Knaggs, bearded, with a cigarette in his mouth, is sitting in the curve made by the largest bear from the Team Idaho-Bonner’s Ferry sculpture, “Endangered Bears.” Wearing a blue event-issued jacket, he’s brushing out the hollow loop made by mama and papa bear.

Three days later, the judges award Knaggs and his team third prize, with Japan’s modern work, “Heart to Heart” coming in second and Germany’s gravity-defying “Four Elements” taking first. The teams disperse, and after a few more sunny days, Northstar tears down the structures before they get too soft and fall — all except the German piece, which can’t bear its own weight and collapses after judging is complete. But the ephemeral nature of the snow is part of what attracts the competitors.

“It’s for the moment, and it’s a beauty all in itself, creating something that’s gonna be disappearing, you know, it’s okay that it disappears,” says Team Truckee’s Ira Kessler. “We are making it for the moment.”

All Photos: Bryan Thayer/Speck

AMC Aims to Repeat <em>Walking Dead</em> Success With New <em>Terror</em> Series

Label: Technology

And the first cable network looking to capitalize on the massive mainstream success of The Walking Dead TV show is … Walking Dead network AMC. After proving that modern horror can draw audiences to rival — and, in some cases, beat — the big broadcast networks with the adaptation of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s long-running zombie comic, the network is developing a second horror drama based on Dan Simmons’ aptly named 2007 novel The Terror.

The Terror offers a fictionalized version of the real-life “lost expedition” of British Royal Navy officer Captain Sir John Franklin in 1845, in which two vessels, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, became trapped in ice in the Canadian Arctic, leading to the eventual deaths of both ships’ crews. While the true story of what happened to the expedition is both mysterious and grisly, Simmons’ take on it is far more ready-for-television, featuring a mythological beast hunting the crews and continually fracturing alliances and relationships between the human survivors.

Much as it did with The Walking Dead, which was originally the product of producer Gail Anne Hurd (Alien, Terminator) and writer/director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), AMC is relying on well-regarded genre veterans to usher the show into reality. Blade Runner and Prometheus director Ridley Scott will be executive producer for the series, while his production company, Scott Free, pairs with Television 360 (Game of Thrones) to bring the show to screen. A pilot script is currently being written by David Kajganich, a screenwriter whose previous credits include 2007′s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, The Invasion.

Considering the record-breaking success The Walking Dead has had, the real surprise isn’t that AMC wants to try and repeat its successful formula with a new series; it’s that other cable networks aren’t doing exactly the same thing already.

Feb

14

SmartBall Keeps an Eye <em>Inside</em> the Ball

Label: Technology

The old sports cliche “keep your eye on the ball” is getting a modern twist by an Australian sports tech company that’s putting an eye inside the ball.Catapult Sports is rolling out the first major trial of ball-tracking technology this spring during the Australian Football League’s pre-season NAB Cup. SmartBall uses a tiny sensor inside the ball and fist-sized GPS trackers worn by players...

Feb

13

Bowlus Travel Trailer Is So Retro-Cool It Hurts

Label: Technology

Think there’s nothing better than a vintage Airstream, those old-school Twinkie-shaped campers that define Americana? Think again. The Bowlus Road Chief is even cooler, and it’s coming back.The original Road Chief dates to the 1930s and was created by Hawley Bowlus, the aviation designer who brought us the Spirit of St. Louis. They’re also crazy expensive because...

Feb

12

Haters Don't Hate Amazon (Facebook On the Other Hand ...)

Label: Technology

Check the comments section on any tech blog: People love to hate Apple. They love to hate Microsoft. And Facebook. Each of these companies has spawned a parallel online hater community.But Amazon? Not so much.The Amazon haters are no doubt out there. But I contend that the intensity of that hatred just isn’t as high. Backing me up on that is a new survey from Harris Interactive (HPOL) that...

Feb

11

Under the Gun: When Less Time Can Mean Better Problem-Solving

Label: Technology

I’m working on an Alien costume. I’ve got the suit. It was built for me, and it’s gorgeous. But I’m making the head myself, and it’s kicking my butt. The problem: I have too much time.I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving. This is counterintuitive, because complaining about deadlines is a near-universal pastime. When I worked with the amazing...

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