Judge Me: First Impression
2012-05 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
A person's first impression is hard to classify, so the judg.me project by Bharath Iyer used a "hot or not" style site for empirical evaluation of 12 traits, among them: short hair makes women appear more sociable, while long hair hints at men less smart and less sociable; sunglasses make you appear more sociable at the expense of smartness, normal glasses have the opposite effect.

Light Painting with Bullet Time
2012-04 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Take 96 synchronized cameras with long exposure and you can paint with light, as Richard Kendall demonstrates. Also cool: "body mechanics" with a multi-camera setup, and sprayer Jeff Soto using a robot arm mounted in a car trunk for mechanic street art.

10 Moons in our Solar Systems
2012-03 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
The non-Earth planets in our solar system have cool moons too, and Io9 describes 10 of them: Most around Saturn (Mimas, Enceladus, Iapetus, Titan, Hyperion) and Jupiter (Europa, Io), but as far as Neptune (Triton) and near as Mars (Phobos). There is also a video on the evolution of Earth's moon, and why the moon is not diffuse by James Palmer. In unrelated news, petri dish is science crowd funding.

MiniPC: Cotton Candy
2012-03 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Heise reports on the cstick Cotton Candy by FXI, a full Ubuntu computer the size of a large USB stick. HDMI and USB at the ends, bluetooth, wifi, a MicroSD card as harddisk, dual core, 1GB RAM. Costs 200 EUR.

OpenGL 4 Tutorial
2012-02 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Finally, an OpenGL tutorial for version 4, made by an openbook effort. Unlike previous versions, everything is done with vertex and index lists, and all the projection math is performed by external libraries. Also pertinent: Another tutorial and the OpenGL4 reference.

Scale of the Universe
2012-02 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
The Huang brothers updated their "Scale of the Universe" interactive demo: Using just a slider for size scale, you can watch various examples of different-sized objects and put them into relation. From quantom foam to the Hubble deep field.

Display on a Window
2012-01 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Another iteration of the "display on a window pane": Slashdot and geek point to a Verge article on a transparent touchscreen by Samsung. Only viewable from one side, uses either sunlit background or backlight, OLED based with HD (1920x1080) resolution at 120cm diagonal. Engadget also has coverage.

Machine Learning (ML) with Python
2012-01 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Ycombinator has a thread on machine learning (fitting a model to data in order to make predictions), with a focus on Python ML libraries: Choose among scikit learn, shogun and theano. For background, the video-based Stanford ML course by Andrew Ng with some notes from Alex Holehouse are good sources.

Nostril LED Accessoire
2011-12 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Io9 points to a Make magazine article on a nostril LED jewel accessoire by Noda Akira (video), which glows in rythm with your nose breathing. First introduced at Tokyo maker faire.

Picosecond Camera
2011-12 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Slashdot points to a New York times article on the MIT picosecond camera (video). Only one pixel row at a time, the device is time-exact enough to capture only one wavefront returning from a short-length light pulse. Repeat on a static scene until all lines, for all returning wavefronts, have been captured: Voila, wavefront photography.

Art from Geodata
2011-11 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Nerdcore points to a creators project report on interactive movies created from geological data such as Google streetview, headed by Aaron Koblin from Google Data Arts. Projects range from a post-apocalyptic streets browser (rome) to, not-very-geo, the sheep market, a shop with 10.000 sheep drawings from Amazon mechanical turk workers.

User Interface: Images under Glass
2011-11 :: Kai Ruhl :: link to article
Io9 points to a good Bret Victor rant about future user interfaces, when compared to the current "images under glass" (e.g. smartphones, tablets) paradigm. Considering human haptic capabilities, he considers the current state of the art less expressive than a sandwich.