Finite Films

This is a lot of fun.  The folks at Finite Films ask for ideas/constraints from you.  Visitors to their website vote on them, and then they put them together into a Hollywood-style short film.  The one below is a science fiction film called Stealing Time, made with the following constraints:

• Cannot take place entirely in one location.
• Someone must say the words “time travel.”
• Two characters must have a long-standing rivalry.
• When one character was a kid, he/she used to wish he/she could travel back in time to see real-life dinosaurs.
• One character is a wine lover and is very picky/elitist about their wine.
• One character prefers bubble baths to showers.
• Someone has to say: “I have to go back.”

Watch and see how they wove these constraints into the story line.

You can find more on the making of Stealing Time here, and of course other moives at the Finite Films website.

OpenCourseWare

A little more about how technology is changing education...

via Online College Course

Science Fair 2012

Its that time of year again.  Of course, I'm talking about the anual Science Fair.  Widdakay and Bix turned in their science fair posters tonight.  They both did a lot of excellent work and have some great looking posters to show for it.

This is Bix's first Science Fair and her project is entitled, "The Effects of Music on Short Term Memory Recall."  Many thanks to those of our readers who participated in her experiment.

Widdakay is a veteran of several science fairs.  His project is entitled, "Two-wheeled, Self Balancing Robot Platform with OpenCV:Phase One."  I'm hopeful that they will both provide you with details of their projects in upcoming blog posts.

If you are in the neighborhood and would like to see the science fair, there is public viewing on Wed 6:30-7:30 Feb 1st at Hiller Aviation Museum.

Matthew Broderick's Day Off

I don't care if it is just a television commercial.  Ferris Beuller's Day off is a favorite around here at Digital Diner and this remake is really nice.  It brings back a lot of memories of the original movie in a short two minute film.  Well done Honda.

More Public Snow Art

Loved this one.  Of course it's one of those things that probably just looks like a few lines from down on the ground, but from here at this vantage point it makes you want to yell, "Don't put them down like that!  You're gonna scratch 'em!"

via Inspire Me Now

Super Cool 4K Video Editing

Do you know what 4k is?  Well, it is super high resolution video that is about 4 times the resolution of current HD video known as 1080P.  It is so new and expensive that even most theaters do not have it.  So pretty much it is really cool and looks really good.  This guy got a MacBookAir playing and editing 4k video over Thunderbolt (a new super high speed way to connect things to new Apple computers).  The amount of data moving over the cable is ginormous.  He used a "Thunderbolt expansion chassis" to hook up a Red Rocket GPU to do the fancy graphics needed to play the video.  You can really add just about any pci express card to a computer with that.

via Gizmodo

Aurora Borealis

Here are some beautiful pictures of the Northern Lights taken during the past few days.  The photos were posted by National Geographic.  This one was taken in Lyngen which is where we visited last summer. The solar flare activity is supposed to peak in 2013, so it  seems like we need to visit the North in the winter next time!

via National Geographic

Udacity

I recently had the opportunity to take the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence class online.  It was pretty amazing to take a college level computer science class from Stanford for free online.  Most amazingly, over 100,000 people signed up for the class.  It was taught by a colleague from Google, Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun from Google and Stanford.

Well, apparently Sebastian Thrun has decided to teach more online classes.  He and David Evans have started udacity.com, a new, free,  online education resource for learning about computer science, so you you can add this to your list of resources.

Additionally, Stanford is offering several free online classes in Entrepreneurship, Medicine, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Complex Systems, and of course Computer Science.

You can also check out Google Code University for classes on thing like the programming language Python or developing applications for Android devices.

You may recall that in a recent post I told you about a few resources for learning to program.  
You now have now excuses.  Get out there and learn to program.

This kind of makes my head hurt

I have seen optical illusions before, but never one quite like this.  Shake your head an an image appears.  Focus back on the lines and its gone.  Does anyone have an explanation for what is going on here?

via Gizmodo

Just sittin on the bench

This week I traveled to a colder part of the world where I found these two fellows sitting on a bench in the park.  They look as if they've been sitting there for a while, and maybe they aren't in the best of shape, but still they managed to bring a smile to my face.  I must say, enjoy spontaneous public expressions of art  .