Leo Villareal

via coolhunting

Moebius display is a hardware art piece. This video is the first presentation of this moebius strip shaped LED screen.

via Martin Bonadeo

Source: WIRED

The Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology just blew our minds with some videos depicting robots playing music with real people. Great, you say. Some fake robot machine can, like, bang around on a drum or something. Not so fast, doubters.

These robots, developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, listen to humans creating music in real time and play along with them. One might say they improvise.

They can't pass the actual Turing test, in which a robot must fool a human into thinking it is also a human during a conversation.

But musical improvisation is another kind of a conversation and I, a human, would believe that the impromptu, non-predetermined parts these robots play were played by other humans. By that standard, the Georgia Tech team's robots have already passed the musical Turing test (assuming that I'd feel the same way if I were playing along instead of watching the robots in a video, and I'm fairly certain I would).



We asked professor Gil Weinberg, head of the program, how these robots manage to parse what humans are playing, and how they manage to play along. How do they figure out which parts to play? As it turns out, the process is somewhat analogous to the way Deep Blue plays chess: by carefully examining its options and then evolving them like biological species to see which one best fits a changing musical environment.

"The processing allows [the robots] to analyze and improvise," said Weinberg via telephone. "In one of the applications, we use a genetic algorithm... You have a population of something, and then you do mutations to all of these little things — in my case it's musical motifs — mutations and cross-breeding between the musical genes, in our case, and then you have a new population that better fits to the environment.

He continued, "Very fast, it runs [about] 50 generations of mutations that are cross-bred between the genes and tests whether this is similar to a motif that the saxophone player played, for example. And it plays something back that is a combination of musical genes of what the saxophone player played, what the piano player played — something that is unique that only can be the product of genetic algorithm."



The results are fairly astounding. Haile, the drumming robot has been around for a couple of years, but Shimon, the marimba playing robot unveiled in early November, handles melody in addition to rhythm. One of the next steps, says Weinberg, is to give the robots to look at whichever human collaborator is playing the most interesting part.

Keith Peters codes in ActionScript 3.0

via booooooom!

The Technium

hat tip synchropocalypse

Buckypaper is a material composed of carbon nanotubes that is 10 times lighter and over 500 times stronger than steel. While the miraculous material used to be prohibitively expensive and hard to make, scientists from Florida State University believe that they have made several key developments that will allow them to efficiently manufacture it for a variety of applications including airplanes and vehicles.

Composed of tube-shaped carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, buckypaper displays an incredible set of physical properties. It is extremely flexible, light, and strong, plus it conducts electricity and disperses heat quickly. Currently it is only used in minute quantities in tennis rackets and bicycles because it is very expensive and difficult to manufacture in large quantities.

Researchers at Florida State University have been developing methods to increase the strength of buckypaper and streamline its manufacturing process. These techniques include the use of magnets to strengthen the alignment of the carbon nanotubes, and texturizing the surface of the nanotubes that improve their bonding strength.

The commercialization of buckypaper holds incredible promise for stronger, lighter, and more efficient vehicles, since one of the simplest ways to make a vehicle more energy efficient is to reduce the its weight. The material may also be used to shield airplanes from magnetic interference and lightning strikes, to build electronic parts such as super capacitors and batteries, and to dissipate heat in laptops.

via Associated Press

via inhabitat

Bioplastics are becoming a burgeoning industry as the cost of oil climbs and the disastrous nature of petroleum-based plastics is revealed in full effect. This past Monday Metabolix announced an incredible development: they have found a way to generate “significant amounts” of ecologically-sound bioplastic by growing it directly in switchgrass. The fast-growing perennial plant is paving the way for a sustainable source of Mirel, the company’s biodegradable brand of bioplastic.

Mirel will also biodegrade in a wide range of environments including soil, home compost, industrial compost, and both fresh and salt water. Mirel’s biodegradability may, in fact, help to reduce the persistent plastic waste that litters our landscape and threatens marine environments.

via Inhabitat | via Mirel

The time it takes for sensory input to travel along nerves and get processed by the brains means we're always living in the past. Okay, no problem — we can live with a few lost milliseconds. But ten seconds? A new study shows that once our brains make a decision (like "push this button") it takes that long for our conscious minds to become aware of it.

Neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany conducted the study, and appear concerned that people will feel robbed of their free will. Interesting, but the real question is: Once brain-computer interfaces are developed for the masses, are we going to need the plodding "consciousness" part of our brains at all?

Source: Nature Neuroscience, via Science Blog

hat tip @weevil

Seems a little long to me. Anyone buy it?

Poemes and Phonemes from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Phonologically driven generative poetry, explored as a response to the standard orthographically driven electronic poetry (and its precursors: Oulipo, Dada).

A genetic algorithm operates on "Poemes" made up of lines. The goal for this instance is to maximize the consonance and assonance of adjacent consonants and vowels, respectively. A new poem-population is created every 200 generations.

The visualization shows the movement of the poem over time in an approximate consonant space (blue) and vowel space (orange).

English language information drawn from the Moby Project. Built with Processing in Eclipse. For more information about classification of speech sounds, one place to start is the Wikipedia article on the International Phonetic Alphabet

via Kyle McDonald on Vimeo
View more of his work here.

Just came across this lecture by Manfred Wolff Plottegg