putting the j in jjosh » science

putting the j in jjosh

putting the j in jjosh

I 8 the Moon

April 7th, 2010

Yeah, so this guy made a version of Dark side of the moon just using the audio capabilities of the NES sound chip. It sounds amazing, somehow. I've been listening to the whole thing over and over, there are some parts that are just haunting, and computer game-y at the same time. Go here to download for yourself, and here's a sample ("Great Gig In The Sky") of what I'm talking about:

wake up to your future

February 5th, 2010

this should feel good, but it makes me nervous…

really well done tho…make that tea!!

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

31 flavors

November 17th, 2009

31 flavors of geek geeking out on the techno-possibilities of the future…

perspex

October 13th, 2009

Having a tough tuesday? Put it all in perspective…

the player-piano-ularity is near

October 9th, 2009

Are you ready for Friday?!?!?!?!

If you read some futurists, they have this theory about how fast the speed of technology progression is moving, and it looks like a graph that starts slow and then suddenly goes almost straight up. The moment where it moves from being a sloped line to going straight up is referred to as the Singularity. Once we hit that, technology will progress so fast it will seem almost instantaneous. All kinds of cool stuff to look forward to when that happens: downloading our brains into computers, sending our consciousness across the universe, etc. Some say it might happen in as little as 50 years.

Or so the theory goes.

I will say though, sometimes I feel like I’m seeing so many mind-blowers on various blogs that we must be getting close to that moment. Case in point:

[This was emailed to me from PatH, and I dunno where he got it from…]

And, far be it for me to pile it on, but I just saw this and somehow it seems to fit with the last vid and musings on the future. Our man Carl Sagan, auto-tuned to sing a fantastic and future-minded song about, what else, the Cosmos. When I watch these auto-tuned pieces, I’m always wondering how much work it took to make…

[via kottke]

bananer

September 19th, 2009

This banner was taken at MOMA a while back for the design and the elastic mind exhibit…it was pretty great…that’s my hand…

we make up reality as we go along

July 6th, 2009

I still can’t quite wrap my mind/eyes around this, but apparently in this picture below, the seemingly bright green spiral and the seemingly light blue spiral are actually the same color. Whoa.

Check out the original post to read more about how this is possible, but be prepared to still not believe it! We can’t believe our eyes! Psychedelic to the max(ine)!!

explosive

June 3rd, 2009

The music is Mark E Smith and Mouse from Mars, von Sudenfeld. The real video for this song is pretty odd, but this one is a blast. They all look like they’re having so much fun.

the Queen of machines

April 21st, 2009

Sometimes something is so geeked out fantabulous that you almost can’t even tell what’s going on. Case in point: this is Bohemian Rhapsody done on hardware machines. The machines make noises of different pitches when they do different things (the scanner scanning, disk drive reading disk, etc.) and these have somehow been programmed to make their specific pitched sounds in time to create Bohemian Rhapsody. Whoa. Get past the intro and it really starts to rock.

cats on treadmill

April 9th, 2009

isn’t this the whole reason I have a blog? isn’t this why youtube was invented?

the 4th dimension is time, it goes inside the mind

February 24th, 2009

listening to the In Our Time podcast this morning, all about time, our conception of it, or perception of it…heady stuff for the subway ride in, makes me wanna ditch work something awful…

good philosophical puzzler in there: if the universe was empty, if there was no "thing" in the universe, no "stuff", would there still be time? it’s great to hear the host get more and more confused as the podcast goes on and gets into stranger concepts…

reminds me of something I used to get into when talking about hallucinations, the fact that we are all experiencing hallucinations ALL THE TIME, that we aren’t seeing the sun, we are seeing light that is 8 minutes old, that the stars we see are apparitions of stars (some long gone), that we don’t actually see any objects, we see the light reflected by matter (i.e., we’re seeing what those objects don’t absorb, or what they AREN’T, not what they ARE), that when you get down to some quantum physics, particles move backwards in time, etc ad infinitum.

golden showers

January 3rd, 2009

 

I like meteor showers…I’ve had some great viewing experiences with the Perseids and the Pleides…once at my great Aunt and Uncle’s cabin on a mountain up in CT where there is no electricity, we saw tons and tons of shooting stars…

and once with MT, MA and EB we drove out to Sky Meadows and snuck under the barrier to have a midnight picnic and saw lots of shooting stars…I think it was MA’s first shooting star? Highlight was when we suddenly heard the sound of a pack of coyotes howling at the moon, loud, and not that far away…

Until today I’d never heard of the Quadrantids, but spaceweather.com has this to say about it:

"Although the Quadrantids are a major shower, they are seldom observed. One reason is weather. The shower peaks in early January when northern winter is in full swing. Storms and cold tend to keep observers inside."

Well yes. Even though it is awesome to imagine Earth intersecting the remains of an asteroid/comet that blew up 500 years ago, I think the cold will be keeping me inside tonight. That and because it’s NYC, I’m imagining I’d have to go wayyyyyyyy out to get away from the light pollution. There’s apparently a shower-viewing event going on in Pelham Park(?) in the Bronx, but yeah, I’ll be home.

And before you say it, I know, I know, "the old Josh would have gone."

driving Ms. Flyborg

November 19th, 2008

I imagine two frustrated scientists who are crazy sick and tired of undergoing flight simulator experiments…they look at each other and begin to scheme out a plan to get revenge…not on the people who created the flight simulator, but a revenge on flight itself!

"Let’s make flies robotically run a driving simulator!"

[via]

welcome our robotic mambo overlords

November 5th, 2008

another in a long line of internet things that astound me, that make me say "Is this happening in the same world in which I live?"

the 6-legged, goateed, fedora-wearing, Lou Vega-dancing robot:

I love the commenter on yt who says "I, for one, welcome our Lou Bega-headed, robotic Overlords."

[via]

man in home-made jetpack crosses English channel

September 26th, 2008

I think the post title says it all. He was going approx 120 mph.

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