I really wish I had my camera with me to capture it while dropping off my daughter to school this morning, but maybe a thousand words (or less) will suffice. The morning had been overcast, but just as I was dropping off Mini Otaku, the cloud cover in the east broke and the sun beamed through. Given that sunrise was only a half hour ago, the light was essentially horizontal, meaning that the landscape was flooded with brilliant light. As a result, all the fall colors of the trees gleamed in their yellow and orange glory, with the contrast even more vivid because the backdrop to the west for the tableau was still dark grey cloud cover. To top it off, a rainbow flickered briefly, but strongly, into existence above the entire vista. It’s amazing how much dynamic range the real world has.
Author: fledgling otaku
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how I discovered anime
Video of Steven den Beste showing me the light.
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BSG4 preview
We’re going the wrong way!
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parallel universes: science and fiction
There’s an livechat transcript at the BBC with physicist/cosmologist Michio Kaku about superstring/M-theory that is loaded with gems. The man is a walking fount of physics aphorisms. His pronouncements almost have a Zen koan-quality to them. I’ve collected some of the better ones below.
we hope to find echoes from the tenth dimension.
dark matter may be a higher musical note on the string.
Boiling water is a purely quantum mechanical event.
Time is like a river. It bends and flows around the Universe.
the problem of consciousness in a quantum-theory is still an unresolved problem.
the forces of the universe can be viewed as ripples in hyper-space.
Our bodies are symphonies of vibrating strings and membranes.
the universe is a symphony of vibrating membranes and string.
we may have to escape into hyper-space if we are to survive the death of the Universe.
the farthest object in the universe would be the back of your head.
we do not find Fermat’s last theorem in string theory.
One theory says that the nearest bubble to our Universe maybe one millimetre away from us. This theory will be tested in Geneva in a few more years.
M-Theory unifies subatomic particles and universes.
The Greeks tried to prove 2000 years ago that hyper-space was impossible.
those experiments are not really necessary. Theory is enough.
the Universe is for free.
there are many solutions to M-Theory, one of which may be our Universe.
Some people have said that time does not exist, which confuses the perception of time with time as a co-ordinate.
Centuries from now, M-Theory, I feel, may eventually determine the destiny of all intelligent life in the Universe.
woah. Most of these make sense if you have even a layman’s understanding of the basics of string theory, but taken alone they have a surreal quality that I found irresistible. He’s obviously got a music bias, but I’m filing this under poetry.
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Americans shouldn’t cosplay
overwhelming evidence.
UPDATE: actually, here’s a pretty good counterargument.
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CrunchyRoll
![crunchyroll.com [logo]](https://www.haibane.info/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/crunchyroll_small.png)
There’s a new video site in town, with a particular emphasis on animation and anime. TechCrunch reviewed the site, arguing it “pushes the envelope” on copyright issues::All video is uploaded by users and has advertising around it. Premium users who “donate†$6 per month to the site get an ad free version and higher quality video. Rumor has it the company is making $75k/month or so in revenue.
Crunchyroll’s business model is unique in that users pay them to view high quality versions of the content, much of which is copyright infringing.
Of course, CR removes content as soon as they receive takedown notices, but the user rating system remains even if the video is gone. And of course users have uploaded their own mashups, OPs, and other fan-driven content, all of which can get rated. The site is organized by series, so all content for a given series is on one page, which is an obvious in hindsight organizational scheme.
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Dell XPS M1730
Dell just officially released it’s monster gaming rig, the XPS M1730. This thing is insane. For $2999 (and up) you get:
- Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) T7700 (2.4 GHz)
- 17 inch LCD WUXGA (1920 x 1200)
- dual 512MB Nvidia GeForce 8700 graphics cards (running in SLI mode)
- 2.0 megapixel webcam, noise-cancelling earbuds (for the online gaming set)
- a dedicated “AGEIA PhysX” processor for advanced physics rendering
- secondary LCD display, funky space age exterior, running lights
not to mention all sorts of options like twin hard drives in a RAID array and a Blu Ray DVD burner. Notebook Review.com has a preliminary review that has no real surprises; the M1730 is basically an all-in-one desktop replacement and gaming rig, and is not really designed for lugging around campus or on your business flight.
I’ve been flogging the idea that desktop PCs, as a form factor, are obsolete. The trend is towards monster rigs like the M1730, or smaller machines that plug into a desktop environment loaded with external devices. I tend to favor the latter, but that imposes a fundamental performance hit (though external graphics cards can help ameliorate this). Even a beast like the M1730 is still going to be second fiddle to a true desktop gaming rig, but still has enough horsepower to satisfy the average gamer.
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skynet ascendant: Xohm
In three years, internet access is going to be so pervasive that our modern expectation of finding a wifi hotspot here and there will seem quaint. Sprint’s new WiMax service (dubbed Xohm) promises cable/dsl-level access speeds anywhere, and it will be rolled out in three test markets in spring 2008. Ars Technica went for a cruise on the Chicago River with Sprint and Motorola to test drive it, and were wowed:The results were impressive. The first time we ran the test, we got 2425Kbps down and 1474Kbps up with a 99ms ping, with the S.S. Summer of George cruising down the river 30 feet below street level. We hit Speedtest again after the boat tied up, and the results were even better: 3229Kbps down and 1500Kbps up with a 70ms ping.
Both the performance and experience were far superior to Verizon’s EV-DO service. The absolute best I was able to squeeze out of EV-DO was 1253Kbps/674Kbps with a 179ms latency—and that was a best-case scenario. Speeds were more typically in the 500-700Kbps range.
Speed aside, the browsing experience was much different than any other mobile broadband I’ve used. Unlike other wireless services, which feel “laggy” and offer a markedly different experience than a wired connection, the WiMAX demo was more akin to DSL and cable. Latency was good, and, as the Speedtest.net number indicated, speeds were comparable to a decent DSL connection.
What is even more exciting about this is that Xohm will be priced to compete against cable and dsl, and will also be more open about service contracts etc than traditional cell phone-based access plans:
Unlike 3G wireless services, which are targeted at mobile users needing a quick broadband fix, Sprint plans to take on the DSL/cable duopoly with Xohm. Sprint spokesperson John Polivka told me that pricing would be competitive with DSL and cable, although the exact numbers have not yet been determined.
There’s also a strong open access component to Xohm. Although consumers will be getting the service from Sprint or Clearwire, they’ll be able to use the hardware and applications of their choice on the network. Polivka said that there wouldn’t be fixed-length, cellular-style contracts either. Instead, consumers will be able to subscribe to the service for as long as they want, using hardware that they purchase themselves.
However, thats just scratching the surface. The first products using WiMax will mostly be laptop cards, but the technology is being designed with the embedded market in mind. That means cell phones, music players, digital cameras, printers… pretty much any consumer device could in principle have perpetual access to the Net. How this will transform user interfaces and usage is anybody’s guess; it’s a truly transformative technology.
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Galactica season 5… sort of
Buried in a story about how the dreary “Caprica” spinoff series is not as thankfully DOA as it should be, comes the astounding news that Galactica season 4 might get chopped into two mini-seasons:
SciFi is contemplating holding back “Galactica’s†final ten episodes until 2009 – a move that would apparently please NBC Universal’s accountants, even as it infuriates the show’s rabid fan base. TV Week’s source says SciFi will decide in January.
Under this plan, two hours of the series’ final 20 hours would arrive in November as the “Razor†TV-movie, eight would begin unspooling in January 2008 and the final ten would reach their audience in 2009.
Take that, Mr. Moore and your whole “end the series at the peak of our creative energy and storyline integrity” !
the TV Week story that is quoted by AICN above also has this to say:
With “Battlestar†fans already waiting about a year for the return of the series — not counting the two-hour “Razor†stand-alone movie coming this fall — returning with only 10 episodes could spark a revolt.
Moore’s storyline also could make fans demand rapid closure, one person close to the project says, since “when people see the ending of the 10th episode, they’re gonna freak out.â€
maybe, but not like we’ll freak if they force us to wait an extra year to see episode 11.
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nanobots gotta go, too
That’s the winner in the “most bizarre” category of the 49th International Conference on Electron, Ion and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication Bizarre/Beautiful Micrograph Contest. The other winners are worth looking at, too.