randform

Yesterday the New York Times as well as the Wall Street Journal published an article about a new motion capture device called “Contour” which was apparently shown at siggraph yesterday and which was developped by former Apple Computer engineer Steve Perlman.
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From July 19 to 21 the annual conference “New Media and Technologies of the IT Society” (“Neue Medien und Technologien der Informationsgesellschaft”) took place under the title “Film, Computer and TV”. (more…)

Yesterday the ORWOhaus celebrated its first “Klang der Ideen”-music festival. (more…)

www.noentropy.net . There is no better choice.

The axiom of choice is a mathematical axiom that states that from every set of non empty sets one can choose a representative from every single one of them. (more…)

This is sort of a follow up post to the post about the interview with Ralph Baer (soon to be put on the net by Andreas Lange) and a hanger for hiding that this post is a real gadget post:-). (more…)

The german artist Dirk Schwieger spent some time in Tokyo and has posted a regular comic blog called tokyoblog on this experience, which is funny and interesting. He had lived also one year in Iceland and did some research on elves. The rumours are that he is about to move to Siberia. So we are of course now anxious to read a Siberiablog and to get interviews with bears, or mathematicians in Novosibirsk.

There is currently an exhibition about star wars at the Cité de la Science in Paris (until Aug. 27 2006). There is also a book of Roland Lehoucq (unfortuanately seems to exist only in french) coming with the exhibition, where he tries to find possible physical realizations for phenomena in star wars. In particular he suggests to use a plasma for making a nearly-star-wars-laser-sword. The book is easy to read and lively written. It is very nice popular science without a didactical forefinger.

Merci beaucoup to Laurent for the book.

This is “old” news. There is an archeological site in Iran called “Burnt city” – a settlement which dates back to 2000-3000 BC. There a goblet of 8 by 10 cm was found on which a goat between two plants is depicted in various jumping positions. If one takes the positions together, it is clear that the movement of a goat was to be displayed.
The researchers put the images in a timely order…so one can see the 5000 years old animation in modern fashion.

The original post was I think from Irans’s Cultural Heritage news agency . However their link to the animation is broken (at the moment their whole site unfortunately doesn’t work properly) but I found another link here.

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