БЛОГ

Archive for the ‘media & arts’ category: Page 107

Apr 21, 2016

Reinvent Yourself: The Playboy Interview with Ray Kurzweil

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, computing, education, electronics, engineering, life extension, media & arts, neuroscience, Ray Kurzweil, singularity

Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age. A few say he’s completely nuts. Kurzweil, who heads a team of more than 40 as a director of engineering at Google, believes advances in technology and medicine are pushing us toward what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people—you, me, the guy with the man-bun ahead of you at Starbucks—to live forever. He dates this development at 2045.

Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York. His Jewish parents escaped Hitler’s Austria, but Kurzweil grew up attending a Unitarian church. He worshipped knowledge above all, and computers in particular. His grandmother was one of the first women in Europe to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. His uncle, who worked at Bell Labs, taught Ray computer science in the 1950s, and by the age of 15, Kurzweil was designing programs to help do homework. Two years later, he wrote code to analyze and create music in the style of various famous composers. The program won him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prize that got the 17-year-old an invitation to the White House. That year, on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, Kurzweil pressed some buttons on a data processor the size of a small car. It coughed out original sheet music that could have been written by Brahms.

After earning degrees in computer science and creative writing at MIT, he began to sell his inventions, including the first optical character recognition system that could read text in any normal font. Kurzweil knew a “reading machine” could help the blind, but to make it work, he first had to invent a text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as a flatbed scanner; both are still in wide use. In the 1980s Kurzweil created the first electronic music keyboard to replicate the sound of a grand piano and many other instruments. If you’ve ever been to a rock concert, you’ve likely seen the name Kurzweil on the back of a synthesizer.

Read more

Apr 21, 2016

The Latest in Science Fiction and Fantasy — By N.K. Jemisin | The New York Times

Posted by in categories: media & arts, science

0424-BKS-Otherworldly-blog427

“In the Three Worlds, sentient nonhuman species are a dime a dozen, and the detritus of countless lost civilizations is embedded in a lush, magic-infused landscape.”

Read more

Apr 19, 2016

A Sci-Fi Short Film HD: “EXIT PLAN” — Directed by Richard Oakes

Posted by in categories: entertainment, media & arts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TLWQWhVhY4&index=7&…34A498DFE2

Enjoy this independent futuristic Sci-Fi short film project by Director Richard Oakes of Dark Fable Media. After the golden age of man and machine, humanity is split into two classes, The ultra rich industry and the surplus. However, neither side can control the bleak fate of the earth.

Shot over 4 days on a production budget of £1800.

Continue reading “A Sci-Fi Short Film HD: ‘EXIT PLAN’ — Directed by Richard Oakes” »

Apr 8, 2016

WebTorrent Desktop Streams Torrents Beautifully

Posted by in categories: entertainment, internet, media & arts

WebTorrent is best described as a BitTorrent client for the web. It allows people to share files directly from their browser, without having to configure or install any additional software. Now WebTorrent Desktop has arrived, offering a lightweight yet feature-rich streaming and castable experience on Windows, Linux and Mac.

wtd-logoEvery day millions of Internet users fire up a desktop-based BitTorrent client to download and share everything from movies, TV shows and music, to the latest Linux distros.

Sharing of multimedia content is mostly achieved by use of a desktop client such as uTorrent, Vuze, qBitTorrent or Transmission, but thanks to Stanford University graduate Feross Aboukhadijeh, there is another way.

Continue reading “WebTorrent Desktop Streams Torrents Beautifully” »

Apr 7, 2016

‘The Next Rembrandt’ is a 3D-printed take on the painter’s style

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, information science, media & arts

A new Rembrandt painting has been unveiled in Amsterdam on Tuesday, and we’re not talking about a newly discovered work. No, this one called The Next Rembrandt is truly brand new, created using data, algorithms and a 3D printer within the span of 18 months. A team of data scientists, engineers and scientists from various institutions, including Microsoft and the Rembrandt House Museum, joined forces to create this homage to the great painter. The team examined all the Dutch master’s known paintings to come up with the perfect project: a portrait of a 30 to 40-year-old Caucasian male with facial hair, wearing dark clothes with a collar and a hat on his head, facing to the right.

They then developed algorithms to extract what features make a painting a Rembrandt, such as the face’s shape and proportions. Ron Augustus, Microsoft’s SMB Markets Director, said: “You could say that we used technology and data like Rembrandt used his paints and his brushes to create something new.” To give their work a real painting’s texture, they used 3D printing techniques to print oil paint in layers. As a result, the portrait feels like it was actually painted by a human artist.

The project, which the Netherlands’ ING Bank commissioned ad agency J Walter Thompson to develop, most likely began as a promotional undertaking. As you can see, though, the final product turned out so good that the same technique could be used to make more affordable replicas (maybe even forgeries) of masterpieces.

Continue reading “‘The Next Rembrandt’ is a 3D-printed take on the painter’s style” »

Apr 5, 2016

Enjoy the Engineering + Music and Video-graphy!

Posted by in categories: engineering, media & arts

CYMATICS


Enjoy the engineering + music and video-graphy!

More Videos by EngineeringWorld. US.

Read more

Apr 5, 2016

Technicolor stores Hollywood history in a bottle

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, media & arts, virtual reality

A Technicolor scientist surrounded by the latest virtual reality technology inspects a vial containing a few droplets of water—and one million copies of an old movie encoded into DNA.

The company has come a long way since the Hollywood golden age, when the world gazed in awe at the lush palette of “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind” provided by its three-strip cameras.

Now celebrating its centenary year, Technicolor’s laboratories are at the cutting edge of the science of filmmaking, leading a worldwide revolution in immersive entertainment.

Read more

Mar 29, 2016

Why You Should Care About Nukes

Posted by in categories: media & arts, military, physics

For info about divesting from nuclear weapons companies, go to http://responsibleinvest.org/

Thanks to the Future of Life Institute for helping support this video http://www.futureoflife.org (in particular, thanks to Max Tegmark for guest narrating and Meia Chita-Tegmark for her feedback)

Continue reading “Why You Should Care About Nukes” »

Mar 28, 2016

Watch a man manipulate George Bush’s face in real time

Posted by in categories: entertainment, media & arts

You know that scene in the classic film Bruce Almighty when Jim Carrey uses his God-like powers to mess with Steve Carrell’s character while he’s giving a live news broadcast? That’s what this video looks like (kind of), except replace Steve Carrell for George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Barack Obama, and Jim Carrey for a team of wily researchers.

The system was designed by researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Max-Planck-Institude for Informatics, and Stanford University. The same team worked on a similar facial expression transfer project last year, but that involved controlling the expressions of someone in the same room. This time they’re doing it with YouTube videos. First, the “target actor” (that’s Bush, Trump, Putin, and Obama) is rendered with a neutral expression. Then, the expressions of the source actor (that’s the other guy) are captured via webcam, and those expressions control the animation in the YouTube video.

Continue reading “Watch a man manipulate George Bush’s face in real time” »

Mar 28, 2016

Want to live forever? Ray Kurzweil thinks that may be possible very soon

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, media & arts, Ray Kurzweil

When rock band Queen asked us “Who wants to live forever?” back in 1986, we interpreted it as standard lyrical rhetoric. But now, three decades and what feels like light years in technological, medical, and scientific advances later, the answer to that age-old question may have changed. And according to Ray Kurzweil, the famous American inventor who has been described as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” we’re nearing immortality.

As the man responsible for the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer, and much more, Kurzweil has a knack for spotting trends and anticipating the future. And if history is any indication (and his word stays true), we may be in for a long, long lifetime.

In an episode of PBS’s News Hour last week, Kurzweil noted that death, which he describes as “a great robber of meaning, of relationships, of knowledge,” will soon be conquered. Indeed, the futurist notes, our species will soon be able to defeat disease and degeneration, and live “indefinitely.”

Continue reading “Want to live forever? Ray Kurzweil thinks that may be possible very soon” »