May 21st, 2010
WSJ has an article on how commercial scientists have announced their creation of a cell with a synthetic genome. They call it a synthetic cell, which I think is a bit of a stretch, but I’m just as terrified.
Scientists Create First Synthetic Cell
Pretty exciting medicinal and industrial possibilities, but it doesn’t take much thinking to conceive of a how the dark side of mankind’s nature might apply it to warfare. I was already worried about a “grey goo” style end of the world, but now I wonder if I might live long enough to actually witness it happen.
*shiver*
Tags: Genetics, The End
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May 21st, 2010
Here’s a sweet video from a model plane’s on-board camera. Surely this has been done before, but I think it looks like a lot of fun!
http://www.gcmingati.net/wordpress/2010/03/01/103/
Tags: Robotics
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May 18th, 2010
Here’s a noise generator made in Processing which creates cloudy-looking noise which tiles! It’s extremely inefficient, but the algorithm looks really neat while it’s working!
Here’s a sample of its output, manually tiled (and scaled) to show that it’s seamless.

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Tags: Processing
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May 18th, 2010
Check out my first foray into Processing: a 2.5D mosaic experiment.
Waaay faster as a standalone application (or run from within Processing).

One thing that I really like is the way you can see the waves reflecting off the walls. Sure, this isn’t exactly the most spectacular example of emergent behaviour, but it’s certainly not explicitly coded in. I think that’s pretty neat.
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Tags: Interactive, Java, Processing
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March 24th, 2010
Recently I was horrified to learn that there is no AS3 equivalent for the AS2 event “onReleaseOutside”. I consider to be an extremely useful and important event. Although it can be emulated faithfully with the provided mouse events and a complicated bunch of calls to add/removeEventListener, it’s something you have to implement again and again. Because I was too lazy, I’ve been grumbling, sighing, and copy-pasting code without much more thought.
But as it turns out, I don’t have to anymore because Tyler of xtyler.com has released a super-groovy as3 library for making any InteractiveObject behave as a button.
Siic! [sic]
Tags: Flash and ActionScript, Rant, Shortcuts and Timesavers
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March 23rd, 2010
Telecom New Zealand’s apt new advertising campaign.

Maybe this should read “help is only 11 calls away”, which describes the frustrating situation which lead to this pic.
Thanks Lem!
Posted via email from aaaidan’s posterous
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March 4th, 2010
I just had the honour and priviledge of introducing someone to the concept of “Alt-Tabbing” in Windows.
Needless, they were excited about the possibilities.
Tags: Cute Things, Shortcuts and Timesavers
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March 2nd, 2010
I hope Brandel doesn’t mind me posting my evolution of his sand experiment.
Pretty nifty?
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