Archive for May, 2010

Scientists Create First Synthetic Cell – WSJ.com

Friday, 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*

Remote control flight with on-board camera

Friday, 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/

Tiling noise generator in Processing

Tuesday, 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.

Tiled noise

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Pixel Lake

Tuesday, 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).

PixelLake screenshot

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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