I found this HD webcam overlooking the Miraflores lock on the Panama canal. A fascinating reminder of the ever-turning wheels of trade, and great when you can see a panamax-class vessel go through (the largest that will fit, with less than a metre clearance on each side).
Updates are a little bit less regular than one would like, but it does work. I wonder how long it will be before we commonly see full-motion video of such sites?
Good news for those following Australia’s 2004 submission to the UNCLOS Commission for extension of the recognised continental shelf of Australia – the claim has been upheld. Find the full submission , so you can see the new boundaries.
The new claim covers over 2.7 million sqkm, not including a placeholder claim staking out continental shelf around the Australian Antarctic Territory.
Finally, the hopeless, incompetent NSW government realises it has to upgrade Sydney’s train system, and it’s a good start – a $12b metro line from St James (CBD) to Rouse Hill in the Northwest. Over 32km of new tunnel – because they didn’t reserve land years ago, like they should have – and 17 new stations, including one at Epping, which will connect to Chatswood. Major construction to start next year. Metro-style single deck trains, probably driverless – good shit.
(warning – 2.5MB PDF)
This is so long overdue it’s not funny, but it’s a good start. Now we need only another 5 or so of these lines. With the Greater Sydney Metro Region over 5 million now – almost a quarter of the whole country lives here – the lack of investment in Rail infrastructure has long been the single worst thing about the NSW government – pouring billions into roads but nothing into rail! Don’t get me wrong, I love roads, but for commuters trains are many times more efficient.
I am not exactly a true believer in the current Greenhouse Effect scare campaign but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea to burn away millions of litres of increasingly precious oil, and fill the atmosphere with megatons of CO2, while commuters sit one per car in gridlocked traffic. If fear of Global Warming leads to more investment in public transport, maybe I’ll jump on that bandwagon after all!
The Gulfstream G650 has been announced.
Check out their fast-loading flash presentation or the still-incomplete wikipedia page – almost 13,000km range. Sweet.
So, who’s gonna be the lucky donor? First come first serve!
Apple announced that the recently announced iPhone Software Developement Kit (SDK) has been downloaded over 100,000 times within the first four days of its launch.
That iPhone SDK is 2.1GB. 100,000 * 2.1GB is 210TB in 96 hours, over 600 megabytes a second sustained.
That’s a lot of data!
Sorry for more masturbating over CNC mills, but this blew me away:
That is amazing. Is it more than 5-axis? I’ve lost count.
Sonne, by Rammstein. One needs a heavy metal soundtrack to one’s detailed fantasies about walking through the Macintosh Business Unit and shooting everyone in there to pieces, and what better heavy metal is there than Rammstein?
Another old rip, by the way, continuing the recent trend.
After playing with the excellent comic layout program Comic Life for 10 minutes, I felt the artwork I had created was too precious to be denied to this haunted, aching world, so here it is:
I could not believe this:
The squares A and B are the same shade of grey.
I couldn’t believe it. I looked at it every way I could, trying to see how it was possible. I couldn’t until I finally sampled the damn pixels in Color Schemer Studio. Both squares are #787878.
Who you gonna believe — me, or your own lyin’ eyes?
This WIRED article describes the initial success, on mice, of a treatment for skin cells which genetically reprograms the cells to, at least partially, “act younger”.
The article is couched in unconclusive weasel words – that this “may” lead to human remedies, that it “could” lend support to Aubrey De Grey’s theories on combating aging which I thought I’d talked about here before but now can’t find it. Anyway, that’s all bullshit – when the article pointlessly asks “Are Humans Next?” – of course they are. Humans are willing to go to almost any length and pay any price to look younger, and the anti-senescence market will be enormous. Hell, I bet that they’d have no difficulty at all signing up 500 desperate test subjects just based upon the mouse success.
Aubrey de Grey’s theories are compelling and this new experiment’s success indeed lends them credibility. Hopefully this spurs increased urgency of investment and research into the area.
View de Grey’s lectures on the subject here – I recommend the speech from TED Global here.
UPDATE: Check out this chart of a “Network Model of Biochemical and Physiological Interactions in Human Senescence” to crush any momentary optimism you may have experienced upon hearing the above news.
Then again .. is it really all that much more complicated that what IIS does every time it serves a web request?
As discovered by Wincent the ruby mail console Sup is looking great. Ah, the memories .. it’s just like running elm (or pine) back in 1993! Except, way better, and it can do mbox over remote. I can see myself coming to love this.
Just a couple of small problems – the lack of unicode, and the fact that it stores your ssh passwords in plaintext in ~/.sup/sources.yaml.
Still, glorious days and as of now the most 1337 way to check your mail, bar none.
I may as well use this entry to also announce that I’m retiring my gmail accounts – and the advent of cool tools like this to access mbox-based mail only speeds my wish to migrate. I no longer trust gmail, and prefer to host my own mail servers.
My old gmail address will still work indefinitely, but replies may come from a different domain. I might also change my DNS over in the next few days so I can add SPF records, there might be some disruption but only temporarily.
Finally, soldiers are beginning to look like I think they should. Of course, a lot of this doesn’t make it into actual combat – they are basically playing paintball, and those helmets would be more hindrance than help until they have HUDs w/ built-in audio, and also can actually stop something. But it’s a start!
I think it’s important for the military to look as cool as possible.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been so transfixed by a demonstration of a computer game as that for Little Big Planet, coming soon for PS3. Can’t help but be reminded of Lemmings on the Amiga, although the gameplay doesn’t have much in common .. I couldn’t take my eyes off those little guys, either. Must look freaking amazing in 1080p.
And the catchy song playing in the background is actually by The Go! Team, Get It Together, which was a little surprising because they’re kind of famous for turning away companies who want to use their songs. Guess they liked the game too, then. Listen to the song, if only for a good example of how insanely over-the-top drumming and Bomb Factory can make anything sound cool, even a song whose main instruments are otherwise a pipe flute and tin drums. I love that band’s rhythms, though – just listen to the syncopation in the tin drum “chorus”. If that doesn’t get you air drumming, nothing will.
Anyway. Finally a game to be excited about on the PS3. Pity it’s not coming out for another 6 months : /
What do you get when you spend billions of dollars hiring tens of thousands of the smartest programmers on earth, and then tell them to go improve your map application – which is already far and away the best available?
. Doesn’t work in too many places outside San Fran right now but jesus it’s impressive.
Check out this video of a high-spec RC helicopter being flown by famous pilot Alan Szabo.
the top video on this page (sorry – the idiots don’t allow direct linking).
Having become accustomed to the typical flight characteristics of full-size helicopters, one forgets that the limitations of that flight are not imposed by the form factor of the vehicle – as amply demonstrated by this video! They are, in fact, imposed by material strength, power to weight, and human factors – both the ability of the human pilot to withstand high-G manuevering, and also his basic ability to retain a spatial understanding of his position and movements.
One can predict that given a combination of the orders-of-magnitude increases in materials strength-to-weight promised by nanotechnology, and advances in telepresence, we could conceivably see some descendant of the Apache acting in a similar way over some future battlefield ..
UPDATE: RC indoor aeroplane ballet: