Group items tagged

Cool ant pictures

What about a 3D picture of our office? - LS: nice! should I bring my camera tomorrow? who is volunteering?

Interestingly, Google uses optical character recognition (ocr) on pdfs that their bots find online, and then convert to html to make them searchable.

Funny pictures

Search engine for pictures - have a look

An alternative to curiosity cloning: Let millions of people have a look at the pictures...

I am quite amazed that they apparently still use the capsules to return the pictures??? Hard to believe .... "Kobalt spacecraft reportedly carry canisters to return film to Earth during the satellite's mission, which will last at least several months."

Interesting pictures taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft.

Continuing the museum theme... today's Wikipedia Picture of the Day. This might be *the* ultimate test of the knowledge of Dutch... can you name any of them? On the more ACT-like note: I wonder how the contemporary version would look like? P.S. Yes, the proverbs are listed on Wikipedia and yes, lots of them involve herring.

Implementation of the deep learning-based image classifier (online). Try making a picture with your phone and upload it there. Pretty impressive results. EDIT: Okay, it works the best with well exposed simple objects (pen, mug).

On March 28, ATV-3, named Edoardo Amaldi, docked with the ISS. Astronauts on the station took this unbelievable picture of it as it approached

More pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/ ATV docking is a bit further down the photostream.

Metamaterials that absorb seismic waves rather than steer them, might be a better way to protect some buildings, say engineers

what are seismic metamaterials?

must look funny ... They calculate the properties of such a metatmaterial and how it might be constructed with a basic repeating unit in the form of a concrete cylinder some 18 metres in diameter, with four perpendicular holes in its sides (see picture). These cylinders, perhaps varying in size to absorb a range of seismic wavelengths, would need to surround the foundations of a building in cylindrical shells some 60 metres across. That needn't be prohibitively expensive but it would be a big structure that could only be constructed around isolated buildings (thereby somewhat negating the supposed benefit that other buildings in the earthquake 'shadow' might also be protected).

Around since last July, the TacoCopter website suddenly grabbed the web's attention days ago with its claim that they will take your order via a smartphone and deliver tacos straight to your location with GPS-guided, unmanned quadcopters....

According to the picture of the quadrocopter, you end up being chased by four flying, GPS-guided rotating blades...

this will be big! check the video. according to one of the related posts, they'll be on sale already by the end of 2012! Surprising that it's Google and not Apple to come up with this

> Surprising that it's Google and not Apple to come up with this It's sort of hard to think when your brain's gone.

the ArduSat (Arduino - satellite) will be the first open platform allowing the general public to design and run their own space-based applications, games and experiments, steer the onboard cameras to take pictures on-demand, and even broadcast personalized messages back to Earth.

The enormous solar plant-jointly owned by NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy and Google-opened for business today ... well yesterday, but still impressive!

impressive pictures - looking at the 2nd to last and 4th to last one, I am wondering how this distributed individually control of the mirrors works - and idea?

Machine learning obviously. Most likely neural networks :P On the other hand: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-solar-plant-is-killing-birds-meltin-1525107821

That is about € 14e9 - enough to pay more than a million YGTs for half a year. Could we use maybe just half a million YGTs for half a year to build a similar platform and keep the remaining € 7e9 for ourselves? Keep in mind that WhatsApp only has 45 employees (according to AllThingsD: http://goo.gl/NtJcSj ). So we would have an advantage > 10000:1. On the other hand does this mean that every employee at WhatsApp gets enough money now to survive comfortably for ~5000 years or will the inevitable social inequality strike and most people get next to nothing while a few get money to live comfortably for ~1000000 years? Also: Does Facebook think about these numbers before they pay them? Or is it just a case of "That looks tasty - lets have it"? Also (2): As far as I can see all these internet companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Twitter...) seem to make most of their income from advertising. For all these companies together that must be a lot of advertising money (turns out that in 2013 the world spent about $ 500 billion on advertising: http://goo.gl/vYog15 ). For that money you could of course have 20 million YGTs roaming the Earth and advertising stuff door-to-door... ... ...

The whole valuation of those internet companies is a bit scary. Things like the Facebook and Twitter ipo numbers seem just ridiculous.

Facebook is not really so much buying into a potential good business deal as much as it's buying out risky competition. Popular trends need to be killed fast before they take off the ground too much. Also the amount of personal data that WhatsApp is amassing is staggering. I have never seen an app requesting so many phone rights in my life.

"I don't have a cell phone. I won't carry a cell phone," says Stallman, founder of the free software movement and creator of the GNU operating system. "It's Stalin's dream. Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop." he is right once more ...

I am going to live in the forest! Sadly, while true, there's no way around it these days. On the up-side the information overflow these days exceeds processing speeds. Soon it will become increasingly difficult for NSA or other organizations to find anything in the tons of data they stash away. Like some guy said in a random youtube video I can't find now anymore: "good luck trying to find my personal data when I'm tagged in 5000 pictures of cats!"