Posts

June 11, 2013

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6:00 AM | Sony PlayStation 4 Priced at $400

Sony capped off the first night of E3 with its press conference, showing off the PS4 console hardware to the public for the first time and showcasing more games than its February reveal event. But if you've been following today's announcements, you know these details already. The PlayStation 4 will launch this holiday season for $400 in the US. It will not require an online connection for single-player games, nor periodic online check-ins. It will play used-games and allow owners to sell and […]

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5:30 AM | Mac OS X Mavericks Succeeds Mountain Lion This Fall

iOS 7's visual rebirth, which Apple's Tim Cook called the biggest change since the introduction of the iPhone, was the star of the show at Monday's WWDC keynote. But it wasn't the only piece of software at the event showing off a new look. After Mountain Lion and Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard, and every previous version of Mac OS X, Apple's moving away from big cats with the next version of OS X. It's called Mavericks.OS X Mavericks looks plenty familiar. Unlike iOS 7, this year's iteration of […]

June 10, 2013

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10:30 PM | Xbox One Launching in November for $499

Xbox: On.Xbox: Release Date. November 2013? That sounds just right--the Xbox One, complete with a Kinect and wireless controller, will launch around the world in time for the holiday shopping season.Xbox: Price. Four hundred and ninety-nine dollars? Xbox, are you sure you didn't mean three hundred and ninety nine dollars? No? Are you sure sure?Microsoft is, apparently, quite confident that the Xbox One will sell at the hefty price of $500. At Monday's E3 press conference, the company announced […]

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9:30 PM | Apple Refreshes MacBook Air with All-Day Battery Life and Announces a New Mac Pro

Is it a trash can? No. Is it a time capsule? Nope. Is it a torpedo? Not even. Surprise--it's a Mac Pro! After several years with no major updates, Apple showed off a brand new Mac Pro desktop at this year's WWDC keynote, and it may possibly the most un-computer-looking computer any major company has ever released. Apple's ditched the classic blocky tower design for a rounded cylindrical body, though they've kept (and significantly improved on) all the power inside the workstation, which is […]

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8:15 PM | Apple's iOS 7 Adds Deeper Multitasking, Control Center and More Alongside a Minimalist Aesthetic

A common refrain echoed through Apple's announcements at its annual WWDC keynote on Monday, as Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi demonstrated the completely redesigned iOS 7 and the next iteration of Mac OS X, named Mavericks. "We completely ran out of green felt," he joked as he showed off iOS Game Center, which finally ditched its poker table-inspired skeumorphic design. OS X's Calendar, too, got a quip--it manages to stick to the desktop, even without its tacky tan stitching. […]

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7:58 PM | Live Google Hangout Q&A With Adam and Will

Monday is a good day to hang out and answer questions, right? We'll take your questions in this live Hangout and answer what we can.

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5:12 PM | Role modeling starts early

I have a t-shirt from Grace Hopper 2010 in Atlanta. The t-shirt (I believe it was the one from Google that year) has the famous picture (shown here) of Grace Hopper and the UNIVAC. Recently my daughter started asking me “who is the lady on your shirt, Mommy?” when I wear the shirt. Usually I […]

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2:29 PM | A statistical problem with “nothing to hide”

One problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it assumes innocent people will be exonerated certainly and effortlessly. That is, it assumes that there are no errors, or if there are, they are resolved quickly and easily. Suppose the probability…Read more ›

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1:02 PM | Valiant's Book Out: Probably Approximately Correct

Les Valiant has a new book out: Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex WorldI was sent a free copy last week, but was delayed in reading it due to my avocational vocation. (I was "talking with lawyers" a bunch.) But I wanted to make sure to finish it over the weekend. And now I'll recommend it all to you.It would be, I think, somewhat inappropriate for me to attempt to review the book, but I'll aim to give some […]

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12:00 PM | The weight of code

From Bjorn Freeman-Benson’s talk Airplanes, Spaceships, and Missiles: Engineering Lessons from Famous Projects Bjorn is discussing the ferrite core memory of the Apollo guidance system. These are very, very robust memory systems. … But the problem is that they actually…Read more ›

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10:44 AM | Living with Glass: Picking Up and Learning to Use Google's Project Glass Explorer Edition

I picked up a pair of Google’s Project Glass Explorer Edition augmented reality glasses yesterday. It’s the kind of thing I generally discourage people from doing, but when I had an opportunity to buy a pair early courtesy of the If I Had Glass program, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try them out and talk about them on the site. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.Once you are selected by Google to buy a pair of Project Glass Explorer Edition glasses […]

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7:36 AM | Sparse Recovery of Streaming Signals Using l_1-Homotopy - implementation -

We featured L1 Homotopy: A MATLAB Toolbox for Homotopy Algorithms in L1 Norm Minimization Problems before but it has now been updated to version 2.0 to deal with streaming measurements. Here is the attendant paper: Sparse Recovery of Streaming Signals Using l_1-Homotopy by M. Salman Asif and Justin Romberg. The abstract reads: Most of the existing methods for sparse signal recovery assume a static system: the unknown signal is a ﬁnite-length vector for which a […]

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7:05 AM | How To Buy RAM For Your Next PC

As I said in my very first PC building story, I think 8GB is the sweet spot for RAM right now, across AMD and Intel platforms. To quote that post:"RAM is cheap these days. 8GB is plenty for gaming, and an 8GB kit of DDR3/1600 costs around $40. There’s no need to cut corners farther than that. Get a kit with two 4GB sticks, so you can utilize dual-channel mode on your motherboard. You’ll be able to add another 2 x 4GB kit later, or even a 2 x 8GB kit, as you’ll be getting a motherboard […]

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7:00 AM | Show and Tell: Podcasts in the Shower

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3:00 AM | Google Play App Roundup: Google Keyboard, Quadropus Rampage, Space Colony LWP

Google Play is always changing and growing. New apps show up weekly that could easily improve your device, but how are you supposed to know about them? Well, the Google Play App Roundup is a good start. This is where we bring you the best new and newly updated apps on Android. Just click the app name to head right to the Play Store.This week typing gets easier, you become a quadropus, and the home screen gets prettier.Google KeyboardThe vast majority of Android devices in the wild are not […]

June 09, 2013

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10:35 PM | Harvard Humanities

There's been a mild hubbub toward the end of the week here, due to a report and some articles (Boston Globe, WSJ) that the number of students majoring at the humanities at Harvard is in decline. (See also this post at Shots in the Dark.)Happily, this appears to be much ado about nothing. Ben Schmidt at Princeton has already run the nationwide number, and shown that the decline is really more about a bubble in the 1960's of humanities majors. Which just goes to show, when […]

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10:30 PM | Bird Feeders, Pornography, and Other Evolutionary Traps

“Examples of animals exhibiting maladaptive responses to evolutionary novel objects and becoming trapped. (A) A Cuban tree frog (Osteopilus septentrionalis) ingesting a decorative light that mimics the bioluminescent qualities of its insect prey. (B) A black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) killed by the ingestion of small, often colorful, floating garbage that mimics food items. (C) A [...]

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3:58 PM | How to fit a sentence in a rectangle with the Hershey vectorial font.

via wikipedia: The Hershey fonts are a collection of vector fonts developed circa 1967 by Dr. A. V. Hershey (...). Vector fonts are easily scaled and rotated in two or three dimensions; consequently the Hershey fonts have been widely used in computer graphics and computer-aided design programs.. When programming, I often have to fit a sentence in a rectangle (for example to write the name of a

June 08, 2013

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3:19 PM | Saturday Morning Videos: Robot Programming through demonstration, Using Chrome to talk to an Arduino, Orbit Imagery, DYI Raman spectroscopy, Radar data of asteroid 1998 QE2

Here are some of the videos that caught myattention this week: Robot programming through demonstration: Building Ikea furniture, For more information please visit: http://www.ros.org/wiki/ar_track_alvar http://www.ros.org/wiki/dmp http://www.ros.org/wiki/ml_classifiers and www.willowgarage.com Using Chrome to talk to and received data from an Arduino board Intro to DIY Raman Spectroscopy Asteroid 1998 QE2, Radar data of asteroid 1998 QE2 obtained on […]

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3:39 AM | Bottom-up exposition

I wish more authors followed this philosophy: The approach I have taken here is to try to move always from the particular to the general, following through the steps of the abstraction process until the abstract concept emerges naturally. ……Read more ›

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2:53 AM | Quote o' the day: Virtue and value

prollyignored made an otherwise only mildly interesting thread on HackerNews worthwhile: No one feels happy for being called a master chef and be paid, when he works for a fast food chain.

June 07, 2013

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8:58 PM | What I'm Drinking: The Classic Martini

I thought I disliked gin until last summer. My favorite epithet was to describe it as "rubbing alcohol strained through a Christmas tree". Original, I know. Gin's popularity has been on the upswing the last few years, and as part of my plan to revisit things I hated in my youth, I figured I'd better retaste a few popular gin cocktails.Photo credit: Flickr user chris.corwinI started with the classic martini. After making and tasting several different recipes, I settled on Mark Ruhlman's Classic […]

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8:39 PM | Microsoft Shows Windows 8.1 Start Button

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6:58 PM | What You Should Know About PRISM and Technology

You've probably heard by now: the NSA is listening to you. Or watching you. Or reading your Twitter feed. The news broke on Thursday that PRISM, a program run by the United States National Security Agency, was established post-9/11 to analyze the vast amounts of information flowing across cell phone networks and the Internet. Here's what The Washington Post wrote to introduce this story on Thursday:"The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine […]

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5:01 PM | If You're Suddenly More Interested in Encryption and Data Privacy

You should check out SecurityInABox.org. It's a complete guide to protecting your computer and securing your communications using off-the-shelf software that's designed for people like human rights advocates who work in countries where their efforts may not be appreciated by the government. Of particular interest is Chapter 7 (How to Keep Your Internet Communication Private) and Chapter 8 (How To Remain Anonymous and Bypass Censorship on the Internet). Some of the information doesn't reflect […]

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12:36 PM | Orwellian vs Huxleyian

Orwell and Huxley wrote contrasting dystopian books. In Orwell’s 1984, people are controlled by overt totalitarian power. In Huxley’s Brave New World, people are lulled into submission. Orwellian became a common adjective: But Huxleyian didn’t: Neither did Huxleyan: Orwellian gets…Read more ›

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12:21 PM | This week in Review: COxSwAIN, Machine Learning and Sensors MeetUps, Lensless Single Pixel camera, Around the Blogs in 78 hours

Cable and I went through a brainstorming session over the past few weeks on how to best respond to NASA's RFP on SmallSat Technology Partnerships FY13 program. The result is a proposal for which Cable is a PI entitled: COxSwAIN COmpressive Sensing for Advanced Imaging and Navigation. What's a Coxswain, you say ? Like you, I had to look it up on Wikipedia: "The coxswain /ˈkɒksən/ is the person in charge of a boat, particularly its navigation and […]

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7:00 AM | Makerbot Mystery Build - Where the Pros Go

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3:31 AM | Psst—It’s The Definition

Definitions are extremely important src Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali won the 2012 ACM Turing Award last March for their seminal work in cryptography. We are not a year late saying this—that is how the award is dated. By contrast, the official Academy Awards website says that the 2012 Oscars mean the ones for films […]

June 06, 2013

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10:00 PM | The Special Effects Legacy of Ray Harryhausen

Last month, we lost one of the most important figures in FX history, namely Ray Harryhausen. As any self-respecting film geek knows, Harryhausen is the godfather of stop-motion animation. He didn’t invent the technology, but he will always be synonymous with it, which has enjoyed a wonderful comeback as of late.In fact, three stop motion movies were up for Academy Awards this year, including Frankenweenie and Paranorman. Not to mention Ted, which is certainly far removed from the family […]

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