This particular video was using footage of the results from a 6 hour crash course with students who had no programming experience. They began with the source code for a simple breakout clone provided by Thirion, and ended up with this beautiful montage. The wonderful thing about the computational, the generative, the procedural, is that things emerge that often cannot be accurately predicted by the person responsible for the underlying logic.
The growing popularity of urban farming and gardening has been great not only for aspiring agricultural enthusiasts, but also for the catalogs that cater to them. While there has been an outcropping, so to speak, of useful, well-made and reasonably priced tools and equipment, there has been an additional proliferation of items that are, well, not exactly essential to one’s farming and gardening needs.
If you are going to visit such restaurants, go during their first few months of operation. The famous chef, or some competent delegate, will be on hand early in the history of the restaurant to make sure it gets good reviews from sophisticated food critics and smart food bloggers; because the chef is famous, these reviews will appear quickly. Then everyone will want to go there, and the place will become a major social scene. The laughing and the smiling will set in. Beware! That’s when you need to stop going.
allows you to attach a Nintendo Wii Nunchuck to your Digispark and use the accelerometer, analog stick, and buttons for your project (robot control!) or send the data to the computer over USB. With the included example you can even use it as a USB joystick!
A thought-controlled car, a solar-powered drone and a piece for a lunar vehicle were among more than 70 senior engineering projects on display April 19 at the University of Central Florida Senior Design Day Showcase and 5th Annual Senior Design Symposium on Renewable and Sustainable Energy. The projects are done by the 350 engineering students getting ready to graduate.
a directory of ways to participate in space exploration. The site launched in November 2008, partially influenced by the NASA Authorization Act of 2008, Sec. 408 Participatory Exploration that called to “facilitate participation by the public, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and international partners”.
Science Hack Day brings together designers, developers, scientists, and other geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking and building cool stuff.
the system cleverly measures the Doppler shifts created by human movement on regular Wi-Fi signals. That means that the system doesn't require line of sight for gesture detection and, the researchers claim, it could work with off-the-shelf Wi-Fi systems. If using Wi-Fi to detect gestures isn't wild enough, the researches claim that "The average accuracy is 94% with a standard deviation of 4.6% when classifying between our nine gestures."
we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday. Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process.
On Tuesday evening, Iowa City is scheduled to hold the first reading (PDF) of what is likely the first municipal bill anywhere in the country to simultaneously ban the local use of drones, license plate readers, and red-light cameras—three tools increasingly used by law enforcement and often fraught with privacy-related controversy. The ordinance is the result of a local petition brought forward by a citizen group (and represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa) that originally began as a referendum on red light cameras.