Today I saw a very cool video that makes me envious that I don’t have the skills to build something like this, yet I am in awe of the people who did this. Quadcopter formation flying FTW.
Say what you will about his politics and policies dealing with war and healthcare, but President Obama really understands the importance of technology for economic growth and a great emphasis on STEM education.
Aug 182009
A couple of months ago a friend sent me a link to a youtube clip called “auto tune the news” After watching it I needed to have more. Now at semi-regular increments they are doing new ones. The general premise of the videos is that they take clips for relevant news stories, CSPAN, CBS News with Katie Couric, and other sources and run them through and audio processor called “AutoTune.” Auto Tune is traditionally used for after effects smoothing for pop, R&B, and other genres to cover mistakes and to add a level of computer sounds to music. Artists such as Sher, Janet Jackson, and T-Pain made it famous. Recently it has been used as a method to make amateur songs as it can be setup to convert regular speech into something which has a melody. You can read more about Auto tune on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune
A group called “The Gregory Brothers” http://thegregorybrothers.com/ is responsible for them and I hope they keep them up because they are a good laugh every time. At this point there are 7 of them (#5 is my fav). You can view them below and make sure to subscribe to them on youtube to find the new ones. On a side note I wonder if Katie Couric knows about them.
Edit: as it seems the mastermind behind these videos is a guy named Michael Gregory, If you check him out on google you will see he has done a bunch of other parody, autotune, and performances, including an aired audition to American Idol. I may be going out on a limb but he could become the next Weird AL.
Mar 292009
Shigeo Hirose, is the director of the Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab at Tokyo Tech. Thanks to Gizmodo for bringing him to my attention. After having exploring his site it is very obvious to me that he and his team are by far the leading experts in robotic mechanical design. I make the specific claim about mechanical design because there are always more AI and EE developments that are non public, but seeing his work is like looking at a robotic art gallery. I can only aspire to be as good as him in my lifetime, yet I fear that I will never reach that point.
Mar 022009
Every once in a while I stumble on things online that will obviously be a hit when/if they become a product. Quite often MIT’s media labs comes up with some of these but this is the first one in a long time that I can see taking off in a big way.
I figured out a long time ago that the thing that makes a toy successful is the level of interaction with a child and the ever changing experience one can get from said toy. In the world of technology where kids are demanding higher tech devices something like this has alot of promise. Not only do siftables have that edgey feel to them sort of like a new apple product they also show promise of simplist to use and a large audience. If the developers of siftables were looking for investors to start I company I would glady do it as I am sure they will be the “must have” thing in a few holiday seasons.
