Science

Caught this over at BoingBoing, it’s a nice Flash-based simulation that runs through rapidly evolving a vehicle design, using a physics engine to test the thing out over some terrain (not sure whether it’s home-rolled or one of the big ones). Quote from BoingBoing article, from Matthew the author: “This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and initial positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the ‘mean’ and ‘best’ fitness.” ...

My colleague James Hay has been experimenting with Processing, working with some public data made available on the UK government’s statistics site: http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/Download1.do The end result has been captured below, showing cylinders whose height relates to the population and whose position on the map relate to the GPS coordinates for the post-codes in the data. ...

I’ve just finished reading a paper I picked up over at BoingBoing titled “The physical world as a virtual reality”, by Brian Whitworth. It’s a very interesting read so I’m recommending it on here. It’s not a long read, but it does help stop that grey matter seizing up. As a result I see the word “computer” in a whole different light. The paper doesn’t try to say that the world we live in is a virtual reality simulation, as we see in the movie “The Matrix”. Instead it examines several theories, including one that I find very pleasing for some reason; which is that the World is not necessarily a virtual reality, but it *is* calculating, and the mathematics we continue develop year upon year simply unfolds these calculations piece by piece. ...

This demonstration is pretty incredible. The software performs calculations on the entropy of an image (amongst other things), to allow you to resize it whilst maintaining key visual entities. Some examples include mountains, tree-lines or people. Other features include the ability to assign positive and negative weights to areas to make sure they are not distorted too much, or drop them out of existence entirely. View the video here (or hi-res version here).

NASA have released a Java component called World Wind that enables developers to build something that includes Google Earth-like 3D map data. This component can be added to for example a Swing application and the developer can create a mashup in any way they see fit. These applications can be launched via Java web start (an app that launches from a web page as long as the Java JRE is installed, they state 1.4 onwards with some minor trepidation) or distributed as a standalone desktop app (again JRE required). ...

We were lucky enough to have Luciana Haill from IVBA (Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyser) come in to work the other day and demonstrate the bluetooth enabled brainwave monitoring hardware and software on offer. To summarise what it is, this device monitors in realtime the frequency and range of brainwaves in the pre-frontal cortex and pumps that data wirelessly to a computer for many uses. Here’s a video that shows the data it captures being rendered in 3D: ...

Science doesn’t progress smoothly, it makes huge ugly leaps and bounds. But recently a couple of articles really sparked my attention. The first was that they have managed to create a life form artificially. That is, creating life where previously there was none… not just allowing bacteria to enter a given environment as it naturally does. This is a huge step for us all I think; luckily I am not a religious person because I would hate to have to deal with the personal and community-wide ramifications of that “little feat”, it might just open up a lot of questions for someone that may have previously been content in their views. We are already seeing articles with sensational titles such as “Does God have competition?” springing up all over. But this is not a bad thing, the ability to question something you have been told by people you trust is an admirable skill, whether they turn out to be right or wrong. On the negative side, they are trying to patent it which has the potential to raise a bigger moral question on the world stage. ...