Archives for April 2008

John Horton Conway’s Game of Life

Published on 13 Apr 2008 at 10:15 pm. No Comments.
Filed under Complexity, Fun.

I have always been fascinated by cellular automata, specifically the brand governed by the rules devised by the mathematician John Horton Conway, which is known as the Game of Life.
What I find particularly fascinating is the fact that such simple rules give rise to such complex behaviors.  The Game is played this way:
There exists a […]

Read ‘John Horton Conway’s Game of Life’

Flying Penguins???

Published on 9 Apr 2008 at 6:34 am. No Comments.
Filed under Birds, Fun, animation.

BBC released a video showing flying Penguins migrating to the tropics.

You gotta love computer-generated imagery!
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Read ‘Flying Penguins???’

Naughty Nestor

Published on 7 Apr 2008 at 4:05 am. No Comments.
Filed under Fun, Lego.

Its fun to build with LEGOs, but Nestor has other plans…
http://naughtynestor.com

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Read ‘Naughty Nestor’

Arthur C. Clarke’s Last Interview

Published on 3 Apr 2008 at 11:24 pm. No Comments.
Filed under Visionaries.

IEEE Spectrum radio has on audio podcast the last interview with Arthur C. Clarke.
Futurist and science fiction author, Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) created 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as envisioning using geosynchronous satellites for global communication. He is also a huge proponent of the Space Elevator, and says that we will start […]

Read ‘Arthur C. Clarke’s Last Interview’

Making Things Talk

Published on 3 Apr 2008 at 2:20 am. 1 Comment.
Filed under Coding, Entrepreneurship, Evolution, Exploration, Fun, Gadgets, Information, Intelligent Systems, Internet, Inventions, Research, Robotics, Technology.

Looking back, I am surprised at how electronics has quietly advanced to the point where we can buy small programmable computers on chips for a dollar or two.  These are microcontrollers of course, and in my lab we are working on programming them to handle the tedious tasks in our robotics projects.
At makezine.com, I stumbled on this gem of […]

Read ‘Making Things Talk’