Hair Today, Books Tomorrow

I think I've mentioned this fact before, but I get most of my reading time on the bus either to or from work, or during my lunch break. This means that I rarely have the luxury of finishing up neatly at the start of a new chapter, or even at a convenient break within a chapter. The best I can often manage is furiously zipping through the last few lines of a paragraph and leaving it there. Sometimes I don't even manage that, looking up from the page to discover I'm already at my stop.

This means I had to get creative with bookmarks. My first attempt at tracking where I stopped was simply to position the end of the bookmark roughly around where I finished up. This never worked, as the marker slid from its placing as soon as I released it. Next, I attempted to macgyver a card with a slider that I could position at the point where I wanted to pick things up from, but this didn't really work either.

Finally, I hit on an ingenious idea, one so simple, I feel like I should have been using it for years.

Working in a daycare setting I'm often asked to hold on to hairclips for children that get too fed up of constantly replacing them during play. I usually clip them to my ID lanyard to remind myself to return them safely. More often than not, however, I end up finding them where I left them once I get home.

Thus I struck upon the idea of using hairclips as bookmarks. When I need to stop, I simply attach the clip to the page I'm on at the point that I've reached. Then, when I'm ready to read again, not only do I instantly know what page I finished on, but I know the exact line I read last. It works great, and even comes with its own secondary function.

I like to get immersed in a book. I fall head-over-heals into the world, and when things get tense, I get tense also. I fidget during the exciting moments, and having the hairclip conveniently to hand, I tend to snap it open and closed, back and forth in my fingers. I try to be discrete about it, muffling the snap in my hands, but I sometimes wonder if it gets incredibly annoying to people sitting nearby.

I also end up breaking the clips, like I did today to my current favourite bookmark. I may have to go shopping for hairclips tomorrow on my lunch break.

If anyone asks, they're for my wife.

Publicity Stunt, Or Real Deal?

This is just a bit too close to fiction to be fact, but you never know:

Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light

It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light.

Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.

"We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org

The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.

The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.

That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein's relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

Read more at the Discovery Channel new site:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/07/28/warp-speed-engine.html

Innovation Upon Innovation

It is said that the greatest inventors in human history were merely working on the backs of those that came before them. It's true. Very little is genuinely new. Nothing is born into the world that doesn't have an ancestry that reaches back to decades, especially technology.

As much as I love Nintendos motion sensitive controls on the Wii, it's not entirely new. People have been trying it out for ages now. Heck, the PS2 had controllerless controllers with the EyeToy, which worked surprisingly well.

Keeping in that tradition, check out these amazing videos that use the Wii Remote in clever and innovative ways. They are all from Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. Graduate Student, Johnny Chung Lee. His website, JohnnyLee.net is a treasure trove of genius proportions!! And better yet, he posts a bunch of the programmes that he uses to create the videos that follow! Seriously, check it out. It's amazing. I really, really want to see a game using some of these ideas.

First up, using the Wii remote for head tracking on desktop VR displays. Stunning.


Next, using a Wii remote to create low-cost multi-touch whiteboard. This is something I'm really tempted to try out. It would be fun even just to show off and play around with.


And finally, for embedded video anyway, using Minority Report style finger tracking with the Wii remote.


Also worth checking out is Johnny's "Moveable Projected Displays using Projector Based Tracking" from 2003 and, after you've seen that one, find out where that builds to after four years with his video titled "Foldable Displays". It's worth noting, before I get any complaints, that I'm well aware that it is far from a foldable display, and more just a development of his projector technology. It's still freaking awesome! This guy is going to go really, really far if he keeps up this level of inventiveness! I wish I was half as computer savvy and inventive as him.