Jamie and Adam chat with astronaut Chris Hadfield about the limitations of food preparation on board the International Space Station. While astronauts can't really cook their own meals, Jamie and Adam challenge celebrated chef David Chang with the task of devising a recipe that Commander Hadfield can test...in space!
How does the dining experience in space compare to that on Earth? We visited NASA's Space Food Systems Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to learn about the history of space food and sample some of the same food that the astronauts on the International Space Station eat every day. Photos of the food here!
The heart of Google’s product line is search, and there can no longer be any doubt that Google Now is the future of the company's efforts. At the first day of Google I/O, the search giant cavorted itself like it was putting on a real developer conference. There were developer console updates, new tools, and APIs. Still, things came back to Google Now, and that’s no surprise.
The Search app on Android received an update, which was demoed on stage. Along with some new info cards, Google Now voice search gained a new capability -- it can schedule location and time-specific push reminders. Google Now understands natural language in ways that would have been impossible just a few years ago. Google’s data driven approach is desperately close to bringing the dream of a Star Trek computer to fruition.
Google and Apple took two divergent approaches to designing a digital assistant. Apple started with a system that understood common phrases and reached out to a limited number of services and databases to complete actions. This meant Siri could do some neat things out of the box, but it relied on third-parties like Wolfram Alpha and Google to do it. It wasn't about search--it was a digital personal assistant first and foremost.
Google came at the problem of voice interaction from the opposite direction. For Google, it was about search from the start. Mountain View has been aggregating massive volumes of data in its Knowledge Graph, now the heart of Google search cards. Google simply knows a lot of things without going outside its own services. This is the foundation of Google Now.
Google started working on its voice input system years ago with Goog411, which was later shuttered after the company had the data it needed. That enabled raw voice input for searches. The next step was to recognize relevant queries in search history and return Knowledge Graph cards in advance. That's the magic of Google Now on the phone -- it anticipates your searches.
I will never forget how well Google Now seemed to know my schedule when I started using it less than a year ago. Because I had Google location reporting turned on, my device knew where I liked to go, what roads I take, and even guessed my home address accurately. The old line about Apple products is that they “just work.” Well, Google Now is the modern embodiment of that slogan.
The voice aspect of Google Now has continued to evolve, culminating with yesterday’s announcement of reminder support, and it’s incredibly robust with all that Google data backing it. Google Now became an assistant app just like Siri, but it took longer to reach that level of usefulness and it’s stronger for having made the journey.
Let’s take a look at these new Google Now additions and see how it works.
Although the late William Castle, the man who gave us such films as Macabre, The House on Haunted Hill, and The Tingler, had a reputation for making schlocky, low budget horror movies, he was recently called the first interactive filmmaker. And indeed, his gimmicks did make audiences an active part of the movie going experience, even if an inflatable skeleton floating over the audience, or seat buzzers zapping you with mild electrical current wasn’t as innovative as creating IMAX, Dolby Atmos sound, or even D-Box.
Castle was somewhat of a low budget Hitchcock, and much like the master of suspense he would appear in the coming attractions of his films, explaining what kind of low budget fun the audience had in store if they went to his movies. Like Hitchcock, Castle become a brand of his own, and a recognizable face to young horror fans growing up. (Castle would even appear at the local movie theaters, talking to fans, chomping a big cigar, asking them what they thought of the picture.)
It all started with his 1958 horror film Macabre. Castle knew he couldn’t make a movie as scary as Hitchcock, but he hatched a fun plan to bring audiences to the theaters. As Castle recalled in his autobiography, he heard that Lloyds of London would insure anything, and he got them to put up a million dollar policy for anyone who died of fright watching the movie.
“Nobody’s going to drop dead,” Castle assured them. “It’s just a publicity stunt.” The movie began with a ticking clock, and an announcer warning the audience: “Ladies and Gentlemen, when the clock reaches sixty seconds, you will be insured by Lloyds of London for one thousand dollars against death by fright during Macabre. Lloyds of London sincerely hopes none of you will collect.”
Audiences ate it up, and Macabre was a big hit. With the House on Haunted Hill, which starred Vincent Price, Castle came up with “Emergo,” where an inflatable skeleton floated above the audience on a wire. Once time the skeleton fell into the audience, who tossed it around like a beach ball, and at another screening, the kids in the audience threw trash at the inflatable for target practice.
Then came The Tingler, which also starred Price.
I like to build PCs. Not as much as our resident PC columnist, maybe, but I still get a real kick out of ordering a bunch of components and spending an afternoon putting a PC together. I think that earns me a little nerd cred. But you know what earns you a LOT of nerd cred? Building a fully functioning PC—in Minecraft.
My favorite thing about projects like these are that not only are they an incredible example of the maker spirit, they’re a great teaching tool for something a lot of people don’t understand—how, at a deep level, the computer they use every day actually works. Today, we're going to look at some of the crazy things people build in Minecraft and other video games, and how they explain some of the most fundamental lessons of computer science.
If you spend very long hanging out in the sorts of seedy places people where gather to discuss building virtual computers, you’re going to hear the term “Turing Machine” thrown around. For instance, you might have seen that somebody built a Turing Machine in Dwarf Fortress but I’ll be damned if you’re going to be able to figure out what that thing does just from looking at the diagram.
So let’s talk a bit about Turing Machines. It’s a complicated topic, but also a tenant of modern computer science—so if you can pick this up, consider your daily enrichment quota fulfilled.
A Turing Machine is a conceptual machine composed of four parts:
The space program has long been one of America’s crown jewels, but critics often remark as to how wasteful it seems. Well, throw this story right in their faces – NASA has been responsible for many inventions that have made all of our lives better (or at least more awesome). Let's explore ten NASA-derived inventions that might surprise you.
Late last week, Intel unveiled some features and performance data for the graphics cores in their upcoming Haswell CPU. Most of the hoopla revolved around Haswell’s graphics performance on laptops, but Intel also disclosed some interesting bits about desktop processors. Before diving into that, it’s worth considering how integrated graphics typically plays out on desktop PCs.
First Puzzle Piece: Performance CPUs Rarely Use IGPs
On the mobile side, most Intel-based laptops currently include their highest end HD 4000 GPU. Laptops are increasingly becoming closed systems, making user upgrades more difficult–and graphics upgrades impossible. So Intel has been fairly smart, integrating its best GPU into all Core class processors. Even Ultrabooks, with their tightly constrained chassis and limited airflow, utilize CPUs with Intel HD 4000 graphics.
People who build PCs tend to be pretty smart about how they’re going to use a system. Building a small, shared living room PC for web access and light office chores? Integrated graphics may be fine, but so is a lower end CPU. Someone who picks up a higher end CPU – a Core i7 3770K, for example – is unlikely to use the integrated GPU. Usually, that system will end up with at least a mid-range graphics card, like a GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7870.
Intel knows this, and doesn’t really want to spend the die space on putting a higher end integrated GPU into a performance-oriented CPU where the integrated graphics will mostly go unused. A better integrated GPU requires more die space, which increases the overall cost of the processor. That makes sense when you realize that even a relatively low end graphics card, like Nvidia’s GTX 650 or AMD’s HD 7790 substantially outperforms the HD 4000.
Fourteen billion years ago, when one tiny, dense point became an unfathomable explosion creating all the matter in the universe, no one was around to witness the spectacle. We may not have first hand accounts of just how hot the blast or just how fast the matter traveled, but that also doesn’t mean that our knowledge of the universe’s early years are blank pages. There is a record of what happened, and from it, you can make music—the big bang’s original sound track, in fact.
In 2003, the mother of an 11-year old contacted John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, with a question about the big bang. She was helping her son on a school project, and she wondered if anyone had been able to record what the explosion sounded like. The answer, of course, was no, but he kept returning to the question.
Cramer was a frequent contributor to the magazine, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and just two years earlier he had written enthusiastically about how recent research projects looking at the cosmic wave background allowed scientists to hear “the sound of a Big Bang from a distance of 14 billion light years!” Cramer’s linguistic flourish actually meant that the data gathered could be used to understand what the big bang sounded like over a period of hundreds of thousands of years as the universe rapidly expanded. But scientists hadn’t actually heard the sound with their ears. Cramer had access to enough information. Why not recreate the sound?
Staging a revival of a very, very old explosion took Cramer just 16 lines to program, and an one hour on a Saturday morning. He constructed the sound in the software Mathematica, which gives users the option to render mathematical functions as sound. For all his interest in the subject, Cramer explains now ten years later, “I didn’t know what I was going to get.”
The sound (embedded below), compressed to cover the first 760,000 years of the universe’s life, shoots up and then drops into a chest-vibrating hum that sounds like an airplane landing mixed with the static of the television. What came out of the speakers shocked more than just the physicist. Cramer’s two Shetland Sheepdogs came running into the room to inspect what in the world was going on. It was something bigger.
When people write about the great directors of our modern era, they often inexplicably leave out people who direct horror films. Yet it often takes an incredibly skilled filmmaker to make a great scary movie. All of the elements, such as the cinematography, pacing music, and editing have to come together and work like a well-oiled machine in the best scary movies.
It may have seemed odd that a comedy writer, Carl Gottlieb, was picked to craft the screenplay for Jaws, but as Gottlieb explains, “Comedy, at its most rudimentary level is really a craft, there’s really a technique to it. A shock moment in a horror film is like the punch line of a joke. If it’s not set up properly, it doesn’t work well. If it’s handled clumsily or bobbled, it doesn’t work at all.”
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s love letter to horror, he wrote that a filmmaker takes a “great risk” when making a horror movie because if it’s not made with any skill, “it often fails into painful absurdity or squalid porno-violence.”
Indeed, a great horror film doesn’t happen by accident, so here are a few common denominators I’ve noticed in the best of them, some good building blocks to help create a good, scary tale if you will.
Most of us know the Alfred Hitchcock rule of suspense. A bomb is under the table, the audience knows it’s going to go off in ten minutes but the people sitting there have no clue. Instead of having the bomb go off immediately and shocking the audience for a moment, now the audience is on the edge of their seat for what feels like an interminable length of time. As the master director himself once said, there’s no terror in a bang, only the anticipation of one.
I’ve always loved the first twenty minutes of When a Stranger Calls, which takes its time building fear, and it also built scares with simple ideas. Fred Walton, the writer/director of Stranger, advises, “Don’t be afraid to slow down and get into the details of what’s happening each moment. The clock is ticking, the wind is blowing outside, the ice cream bar is melting, all these little things flesh out the environment that the protagonist is struggling in. The things that scare me are the most realistic things, and for most people, the realistic things tend to be really small like the phone ringing, a knock at the door.”
I rarely choose a board game based on game mechanics. In my recent board game bestiary, I sorted games roughly by gameplay mechanics, but in reality, I’m not a fan of any particular mechanic. As with video games, I tend to choose board games by theme and immersion. So you won’t find many abstract games in my collection, nor will you find games that excel as “pure” examples of mechanics.
Instead, I tend to gravitate towards themes. My game collection is littered with dungeon space exploration, cyberbunk, dark fantasy and today’s topic, civilization building. Some of them are area control; others use worker placement. Still others are a mishmash of various mechanics. But it’s the theme of the game that initially attracts me.
So let’s talk about civilization building, shall we?
I’m defining civilization building somewhat narrowly: games that use the rise and fall of human civilizations as overarching themes. That leaves out a game like Eclipse, which you could argue is a civ building game, just set in space. To me, though, games set in space are a different animal altogether.
Civ building wasn’t always a favorite theme for me when it came to board gaming, though. Maybe the vast amount of time I spent playing the various versions of Sid Meier’s Civilization on the PC sufficiently scratched that itch. Maybe it was because I always had allergic reactions to the grandfathers of that genre, Avalon Hill’s Civilization and Advanced Civilization.
As the popularity of board games ramped up, interesting games using civilization building as core themes emerged that I found attractive. I can’t possibly mention all of them, but I’ll touch on five today; four I’ve played extensively, one I just acquired. Let’s start simple and small, then ramp up the complexity.
It’s really too bad that today’s generation doesn’t understand what’s so fun about the low budget movies of yesteryear. We lost the drive-ins a long time ago, and gems like Plan 9 From Outer Space don’t even play on late night TV anymore. When the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez co-directed Grindhouse came out in 2007, audiences didn’t even understand the concept of a double-bill, and many left theaters without realizing there was a whole other feature after Planet Terror.
This is really a shame because when you worked for a producer like Roger Corman, you got real hands-on experience working on a feature, even if it wasn’t high art. (That many alumni who worked with Corman went on to the Hollywood A-list speaks for itself.) Yes, a lot of times the results were laughable, but with a lot of these films it’s remarkable to see what people could do with a few bucks and some ingenuity back in the day.
Rob Zombie, who is a huge B-movie fan, loved how directors of the drive-in era were able to work on miniscule budgets. He told Direct TV magazine, “Sometimes real genius came out of it. There is more passion and heart and iconic imagery in Plan 9 From Outer Space than there is in most of the crap that comes out now. Sure it’s a clunky movie, and of course it’s primitive, but it probably cost about five hundred bucks to make. Give anybody five hundred bucks today and they can’t even order a sandwich with it, let alone make a movie.”
These days so many fans love to make a game out of pointing out a movie’s “gaffes” or mistakes, and a lot of this began with Ed Wood’s movies, which had visible mistakes galore.
But Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, the screenwriters of the Ed Wood biopic, developed an appreciation for the hard work directors like Ed put into their work from working on low budget movies themselves.
Alexander recalled worked long, long hours for $105 a week, “But we were doin’ it because we were having fun,” he says. “At that point, I could sort of look back at Ed Wood’s films and say that maybe the people who made fun of him were wrong. Maybe they’re just kickin’ this guy around and saying, ‘Oh isn’t he incompetent, isn’t that funny?’ Ed directed half a dozen features. That’s pretty good for someone who came out to Hollywood to break into the movies. Most people who come out here to be directors don’t direct anything.”
And once Ed’s life story hit the big screen, there was the hilarious irony that Tim Burton made a $20 million dollar movie that copied bargain basement effects in immaculate detail.
The Panasonic ST50 was last year’s pick for best TV because of its affordable price and outstanding image quality. By all accounts, this year’s ST60 has even better image quality--and cheaper too. CNet put it simpily in their homepage splash this week: “Our first-ever 5-star TV is the one you should buy.”
Initial reviews, including my own testing for an extensive upcoming Sound and Vision article, have even found the replacement not only superior to the ST50, but in many ways equal to last year’s VT50, Panasonic’s top of the line (and one of the best TVs of 2012). As such it is easy to recommend the ST60 for people looking for a big, high-performance TV at a great price.
How can we be so sure? Last year, the ST50 hit a sweet spot in price and performance, making it one of the best deals going for flat panel TVs. They out-performed similarly priced plasma TVs from Samsung and LG. The ST60 is a big jump from its predecessor, offering black levels (and contrast ratios) equal to the much more expensive VT50 from last year.
David Katzmaier from CNET recently posted his review of the ST60, one of the best and first, giving it the first ever 5/5 star CNet rating for a TV. He said the ST60 has “Reasonable price; incredibly good picture quality with exceedingly deep black levels, great shadow detail, accurate colors, solid bright-room performance, and superb off-angle and uniformity characteristics; sleek styling with metal accents; plenty of Smart TV content; includes two pair of 3D glasses.” His opening line says it all, really, “I’ve written TV reviews for more than 10 years, but I’m pretty sure this one is the most important. I’ll cut to the chase: If you value picture quality and don’t have money to burn, you should buy the Panasonic TC-PST60.” His bottom line? “The midlevel price and outstanding quality of the Panasonic TC-PST60 series make it our strongest TV recommendation ever.”
Another David, this time David Mackenzie from HDTVtest.co.uk found the ST60 “is another outstanding plasma TV which produces lush, vibrant image quality in normal living room and home cinema environments. For passive movie and television viewing, it doesn’t deviate from the winning formula of 2012′s ST50 series, and in fact improves on it by delivering even better contrast performance, with black depth that’s better still.“ He also said, “Install a Panasonic TX-P42ST60B in a moderately lit, or better yet, dedicated room, and you’ll be rewarded with one of the best HD television-sized experiences you can buy at any price level – the fact that it’s on sale for £900 is a cause for celebration.” He concludes that the ST60 is “Highly Recommended.” I have tested an ST60 for an upcoming review in Sound+Vision magazine, and can confirm what the Davids found in their reviews.
It’s also worth noting that the ST60 is 3D, comes with 2 pairs of glasses, and has all the Smart TV features we expect in a 2013 TV (like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Vudu, Amazon Instant Video, a web browser, etc). The ST60 is an excellent television that just happens to also have a great price.
Android has come a long way in the last two years, traversing the expanse between version 2.3 and now 4.2. Looking at these two landmarks, it’s plain that Google started taking design seriously. Whereas Gingerbread and older versions of the platform were functional, but aesthetically questionable, the 4.x variants are genuinely beautiful. Google has also worked to fill in the feature gaps and build better developer tools in recent years.
With Google I/O just a few weeks away, it’s looking like we will see the next version of Android -- reportedly codenamed Key Lime Pie (KLP). It’s been almost two years since Android has seen a sizeable interface shift, and it could be time for another. Let’s take a look at what might happen in such a revamp.
First, a word about version numbers. We simply don’t know what version number Key Lime Pie is going to be. Google might not even know yet. The original rationale for the desert-themed codenames was to delay the selection of a version number until the OS was closer to completion. Some blogs seem dead set on calling KLP “Android 5.0.” It is entirely possible Google will go with version 5, but we have no way of knowing yet. As such, I’m sticking with Key Lime Pie for now.
Without a doubt, one of the things that made Android into a much more attractive OS is the introduction of the Holo design guidelines. Google even created an entire website for designers and developers to use as a reference when making Holo-style apps. It’s been a rousing success -- even apps that use the plain Holo templates look great. However, some aspects of Holo are starting to look a bit old fashioned in the world of interface design.
The ripples in carnival mirrors prepare us for what we're about to see when we look into them. Where the surface of the mirror bulges out or contracts inwards, so too does our image, stretching out our reflections into bloated torsos and oddly shrunken heads. No matter how you pose in front of a funhouse mirror, you're going to look weird and misshapen. By contrast, the San Francisco Exploratorium's giant curved mirror isn't so predictable--you can't tell how its metallic surface will distort your image. As a result it's one of the museum's most fun and striking exhibits.
The mirror's metallic surface is so massive and reflective that it fills your entire peripheral vision from a few feet away, drawing the eye inwards and making it difficult to focus on the mirror's edge. But it also produces an effect that you've probably never seen in another mirror: From the right perspective, reflections leap out of the mirror like 3D projections. It's far better than watching a 3D movie. Yeah, you lose the transforming robots and projectiles shooting out of a screen, but you gain a feeling of tangibility that no movie screen can produce.
"I think that one of the reasons that's a little surprising to us is that when we use mirrors or lenses we often project the images onto a two dimensional surface," said Thomas Humphrey, Ph.D, who introduced us to the exhibit. I talked to Humphrey about the mirror after his presentation, expecting a detailed physics lesson, and ended up getting a more experiential overview of how our eyes interact with the gigantic reflective surface. He continued:
"When you use a camera and a lens you project it into a [two dimensional] sensor array...or if you go to a non-3D movie, you project it onto a 2D screen. Your plasma screen at home is a 2D screen. So all the images we see, they're really, geometrically, two dimensional. And we use other features of the image--like one thing is in front of something else, that blocks it, obscures it--[to] tell us that one is in front. But this [mirror] shows us something that you pretty rarely see. It shows you that mirrors actually make 3D images, and when we put a screen up, we're just taking part of that 3D image, one slice of that 3D image, and showing it on the screen. The thing that's most common is that a mirror makes a 3D image, but we never see that because we're always slicing screens in there to see part of it. We're not allowing ourselves to see the whole thing. But actually what lenses and mirrors do fundamentally is make 3D images."
The 3D images this mirror produces happen to be upside down--but only sometimes. Just watch the video below.
Sorry for the break unexpected break gang. My daughter was born the week after the last installment, and just as I was starting to recover, I got sick and was out of commission for a few more weeks. Everything’s groovy now though, and I’m ready to wrap up the build log on my first project of 2013, a set of modular Tetris shelves for my baby’s room. If you’re just joining us now, you should probably check out part 1 and part 2 before you read this.
When we last left off, I’d successfully assembled five Tetrominos, using biscuits, glue, and square clamps to join everything together. At this point, I was pretty sure that the hard part was done, and all I had left was a little bit of painting and sanding. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
For a project like my shelves, sanding serves two purposes. It was important to smooth over any rough edges where my board cuts were slightly off. Typically these little mistakes amounted to edges that were just fractions of an inch off, but the effect was jarring. Any place that the boards didn’t perfectly line up, I sanded until the joints were smooth. I also made sure to sand down any places where glue had dripped or the board edges had burned during my initial cuts.
This is where an orbital sander is extremely handy. My orbital sander--a cheap Black & Decker model--uses a quarter-sheet of sandpaper and allowed me to remove material much more quickly than I could by hand. I experimented with different grit sandpaper, remembering that lower grit numbers are more coarse and will remove excess material more quickly, and found that 150 grit was great for sanding down edges that didn’t meet, while 220 or 300 were better for sanding the surfaces and edges of boards.
Ok, so we've talked about how Apple checks to see if a damaged MacBook qualifies for warranty repair. But what about Apple's best-selling product, the iPhone? My hunch is that more people bring in their iPhones to Apple stores for service than any other Apple product, given the numerous ways you can break it. It's also a device that users seem to scrutinize more carefully--a light scratch on a MacBook may be something you can live with, but a scratch on the iPhone's case looks exceptionally garish. And with the iPhone 5's chamfered aluminum casing, the iPhone is more prone to scratches than ever before.
Unfortunately, it's official Apple policy that scratches or chips on any of its aluminum products is considered normal wear and tear. Apple's Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller said as much in an email to a concerned user back in September. So you can't take your iPhone in for replacement or a free repair for scratches--fair enough. You also can't rely on Schiller to clarify about every point of Apple's iPhone damage policy. But here's the next best thing: Apple's Visual/Mechanical Inspection Guide for iPhones. This is the document that details what kind of damage is covered under warranty and teaches Apple store employees how to evaluate that damage. The VMI guide for every iPhone generation through the iPhone 4S was leaked earlier this year, but not the one for the iPhone 5. That's the document we recently received from an Apple repair technician.
Whereas the iPhone 4/4S VMI guide is identified as document number 070-2515E, the one for the iPhone 5 is 070-3037-D, dated March 28th 2013. It has numerous differences from the earlier guide since it covers only the latest iPhone model, and shows several key changes in warranty damage classification. Let's go over some of its highlights.
First, as seen in the image above, is the inclusion of a cosmetic damage damage section that reinforces what we already know: scratches, dents, and chips are considered normal damage for an iPhone, and aren't covered under the standard one-year warranty. You can't even pay to have this damage fixed in out-of-warranty service. The one type of external damage that is covered is a bulging case that's due to a swollen battery. In that situation, the entire phone can be replaced at no cost. And even if the phone is out of warranty, damage caused by a swollen battery is eligible for a whole unit replacement at the cost of a battery replacement ($80). That's reasonable.
Next, on to the water damage policy. This is where things get interesting.
It’s been years since I’ve recommended using a sound card in a PC, except for certain niche cases. That doesn’t mean I didn’t use them, just that I didn’t think they were necessary for most users. This stance started with Windows Vista, which is when Microsoft decided to support only software audio, seemingly relegating hardware accelerated Windows sound to the scrapheap of technological history. The ostensible reason was support calls–at one point, Microsoft suggested that over 40% of their support calls for Windows XP were sound card related.
So the sound card faded away, albeit slowly. Creative Labs, the largest manufacturer of sound cards, soldiered on. They were still building their X-Fi cards, but putting a stronger emphasis on OEM deals, speakers, headsets and other gear. Most of the systems I’ve built in recent years lack sound cards, but the current crop of motherboard-integrated codecs aren’t perfect either. Anyone who has struggled with weird audio issues (mostly revolving around Realtek's audio codecs) knows what I mean.
Then I noticed something: the sound card was making a comeback.
It began with Taiwan’s Asustek, well known for its vast array of motherboard products. Asus began shipping a line of cards under the Xonar brand name. While some of the products were low cost cards, most were pretty pricey. I used a Xonar Xense for nearly a year, mostly because it came with a nice Sennheisser analog headset that I still use.
You can still buy relatively inexpensive sound cards, but the only reason you ever should buy a cheap sound card is if the hardware codec on your motherboard dies. The real reason to buy a discrete sound card today is to improve the overall audio quality. In fact, the new generation of sound cards are designed to appeal to audiophiles, with features like high signal-to-noise ratios, replaceable op-amps and high end DACs (digital-to-analog converters.)
I’ve been testing two high end sound cards, the latest Asus Xonar Essence STX and the new Creative Labs Sound Blaster ZXR. They both have insanely high signal-to-noise ratios. Both claim a 124 dBA S/N ratio, extremely low distortion levels and flat frequency response out beyond the range of human hearing. Asus even supplies a test report inside the box.
Both cards are PCI Express x1 cards that plug into any available PCIe slot. The Asus card requires a dedicated power connector, while the Creative card does not. Here's what I found.
On December 15, 1836, a fire broke out in Blodgett’s Hotel in Washington, D.C. The building was badly damaged, but the most devastating loss occurred in ideas. When the fire ripped through the hotel, the US Patent office was using the building as a home base, housing heaps of papers and thousands of models—all the patents submitted to the office since its opening in 1790. All in all, the flames destroyed some 9000 drawings of patents pending and approved—90 percent of what the office had acquired since it opened 46 years prior.
The patent office scrambled to piece together what was lost, consulting private records and reconstructing models. In the end, only 2,845 patents were restored. The law stated that without documentation, the patent’s claim was not valid. For the majority of patent holders, it was tough luck.
Here’s the thing: Patents serve as a documented trail of accumulated knowledge. If someone wanted to patent something in these early days, they’d take a trip to the patent office and page through stacks of other people’s inventions.
Because the patent office was a kind of an ideas gallery, “The patents were drawn to capture someone’s vision of the world, the pride they have in their invention,” explains Steven Lubar, a history professor at Brown University. Illustrated contraptions were sometimes surrounded by elaborate scenes filled with detailed shading. It was possible because at the time, there were few regulations governing the pictures. “Making these drawings would have been so time consuming,” says Kevin Prince, a patent agent who wrote the book, The Art of the Patent. “In the past, there was more pride taken in what you presented to the patent office.”
But times have changed. The intricate illustrations that frequently accompanied patents have been, for the most part, lost. Two hundred and twenty-three years of patents have given us a lot of reasons for the style shift. The most obvious being that the oldest ones—the ones that we think about when we think about the patent as art—were gobbled up by the flames of 1836. But the event also changed the way inventors were required to submit their work.
The machines that roam the grounds of MakerFaire spread a wide-ranging gamut. We've encountered R2D2 droids, human-scale cupcake go-karts, and even an honest to goodness giant mechanical spider. The Mondo Spider, which we first saw in 2010, has been a mainstay of maker gatherings like Burning Man and MakerFaire since its creation. It even made its way to Las Vegas for this year's CES, where I had the pleasure of driving it. Sitting in its cockpit and controlling it is transformative--you feel physically connected to the 1700 pound machine as it clanks and stomps across the pavement, rocking from side to side as eight steel legs simulate the gait of a walking spider (courtesy of a Klann linkage design mechaism).
But for the team that built the Mondo Spider--a collective of makers based in Vancouver, it was only the precursor to larger ambitions. Jonathan Tippett, one of the Mondo Spider's co-creators, has been working on its follow-up for the past six years. That project is Prosthesis, a four-limbed walking machine that's more exo-skeleton than mech--as least in concept. In an email exchange, Jonathan explained to us the genesis of both the Mondo Spider and Prosthesis, and why these robotic art projects are both great learning tools and mediums of expression.
How did you get started making ambitious robotic art projects? Where did you learn your skillset in mechanical engineering and technology?
I've always lived, and breathed machines. I think they are beautiful and expressive. It started when I was about five or six, taking apart anything I could get my hands on. That turned into [an interest in] LEGO, which blossomed into a 1/10th scale electric RC car obsession. In those days there was no internet, no YouTube, and no Wikipedia. You had no alternative but to learn by doing. In high school I took metal shop instead of an elective. When I graduated, it was straight to Mechanical Engineering at The University of British Columbia. There, I built race cars, autonomous blimps, jousting cars and devoured engineering theory. [It's also where] I met all my crazy engineering friends.
It was through these connections that I came to participate in the annual Vancouver Junk Yard Wars events [inspired by the TV show of the same name]. We built tree climbers, frisbee throwers, music makers, wave generators, and of course, during the watershed year, a walking machine. I built my own 150 sq ft metal shop in my garage and filled it with as many machines as I could afford. I bought my own TIG welder, mill, lathe and took a six week TIG welding course. People would ask "What are you building it for?" to which I would just say "I dunno yet, I just need a shop..." And like the Field of Dreams, the project came. It was The Mondo Spider. That shop became a nucleus of creation for the Mondo Spider legs, and is where I actually began to hone my craft at building giant robots, along with "The Leg Team", Ryan Johnston and Sam Meyer.
We've seen a lot of cosplay at comic book conventions, but this Raiden from the Metal Gear series is one of the most impressive we've encountered. And at this year's WonderCon, we actually saw two amazing Raidens. Here's how these cosplayers constructed their suits.
