Here’s another inspirational TED Talk, this time researcher Johnny Lee from CMU shows what a $40 Nintendo Wii remote and $10 worth of additional home-made hardware gets you.
An electronic whiteboard
A dual touch interface
“Virtual-reality-like” 3D graphics interface
Apparently he got attention by posting some videos out on YouTube, and after a week over 1Million viewers saw his work! What’s not to love?!?
Here are his YouTube videos and his website where you can get his software to play with…
No, I don’t mean your parents, grandparents, or even your great-great-great-great-great grandparents… I mean 60,000 years ago! I was watching this TED Talk from Dr. Spencer Wells who has been working on a project with National Geographic to build a family tree for all humanity. It’s called the Genographic Project.
You can even participate yourself if you like by purchasing a test kit, which takes a DNA swab sample, then they run the test and use the anonymous data to add to the overall database of data points. The kit costs about $100 and most of the money goes to some non-profit cultural preservation activities. Check out that TED talk for details…
When I saw this in an email newsletter from Ticketmaster, I was psyched! Cold Play is one of my favorite bands and I’d love to see them in concert. So wrote my wife this email…
From: Kevin
To: Alice
Subject: Kevin Birthday Present
Unfortunately, as Alice reminded me… that’s on Halloween. That day the kids get to go trick or treating and have a candy fest. Why oh why would Cold Play book on Halloween night? Bummer!!
This first weekend in August, I was fortunate enough to participate in the first ever Qing Ping Sword seminar by Grandmaster Lu-Junhai. Grandmaster Lu is a 6th generation disciple of the Mizong System and a 9th generation disciple of the Qing Ping Sword. Both of my sifu’s are disciples of Grandmaster Lu. If you ever get a chance to see him perform live, his Chinese swordplay is exquisite — there are no other words to describe it.
This was my first real exposure to this weapon, and it is already my favorite. I think I like the intricacies involved in mastering the jian (chinese for sword) — plus, it just looks cool.
There are 6 routines in the Qing Ping system. He taught us the first routine called “Blue Duckweed Sword”. I’m assured by Alice who’s fluent that the name sounds much better in Chinese. There are 62 moves in the entire routine, and we learned them all in a day and a half. You may have seen in kung fu movies where individual movements each have a poetic name… and this form is one of those which has a name for each movement. Names like “rainbow flies across the river” or “cold spike penetrates heaven”. Again, Alice assures me they sound so much better in Chinese. These names (all 62 of them) were created to help one remember the movement… and although I’m currently learning based on the English translations, I have to say that it does indeed help. My ultimate goal will be to learn not only the form and the names, but also the names in Chinese. It may be a little while before I get to that point, however… I’m still trying to learn the entire form itself.
The footwork in this form is much more complex than I’m used to… it’s a Northern form and I usually practice Jow Ga which is a Southern form. Still, this is pretty cool.
Here’s a YouTube video of Grandmaster Lu performing some segments of his forms (not this particular one). These videos were probably taken 15 or 20 years ago, so you can imagine how much more fluid he is now and how far I’ve got to go before looking even 10% as good as this. And believe it or not, that’s why I love learning this stuff…
He was asked at one point what he thought of our group of students learning this, and how well were we doing considering we were learning it in such a short amount of time. His response was an analogy, which I’ll attempt to paraphrase… A chef can teach another person to cook, but it doesn’t mean that person’s food will taste good. Now we know how to cook. (I guess we have a lot of work to do!)
At any rate, thank you Grandmaster Lu for sharing your knowledge with us and the opportunity to study with you – even if it was only for a weekend.
Well, it’s not a big honor or reward or anything, but still it’s pretty cool that they [Schmap] liked my photo enough to want to use it. It was a photo that I took at this year’s Smithsonian Kite Festival in Washington DC. In the photo you can see the Smithsonian “Castle” and just some of the massive crowd on the Mall flying kites. It probably helps that it was on Flickr and I was willing to share it royalty-free, but hey don’t spoil the moment.
I remember that day as being one where it was kinda tough to fly a kite. The Mall is flanked on the two sides by a row of large museum buildings, so there’s very little cross wind. Yet, there were kites all around us. My theory is that once you get your kite up about 50 feet, there are stronger upper wind currents which will support flying a kite easily… but down near the ground it was a dead calm.
We tried running to force the kite to fly, but we quickly ran out of running room as there were so many people around. Oh well… at least I got a picture “published” out of it.
Micron (and I’m sure others too) are working on solid state drive technology… promises include reliability, lower energy use and performance equal to or better than magnetic discs.
One gotcha seems to be how long a solid state drive will last… the article mentions a lower-end technology called multi-level cell (MLC) which should last about 10,000 cycles and a more robust higher-end technology called single-level cell (SLC) which should last about 100,000 cycles. Although the article mentions some estimates of what that means in real life, I think I’ll wait until the next gen product to try it.
When I saw this in an email newsletter from Ticketmaster, I was psyched! 
