Defy. Gravity. also Seniors 2014 (at DefyGravity)
First time at Merritt’s, BLT with Avocado - good start to the summer (at Merritt’s Store and Grill)
Singing on WQDR this morning- come to the @clefhangers 35th Anniversary Concert April 13th in Carmichael Arena! (at 94.7 WQDR)
I don’t know if I’ve ever had this much Iranian food at once (at Vienna, Virginia)
View from the top of the Reina Sofia art museum (at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS))
A few of us visiting Retiro Park today, best weather we’ve had all week in Madrid. (at Parque del Retiro)
Alcàzar de Segovia, one of the inspirations for Walt Disney’s Castle. Complete with tons of stairs and a huge moat.
The aqueducts in Segovia, and the restaurant where we ate lunch, Meson de Candido (all the way on the left). The aqueducts functioned until the end of the 19th Century. (at Meson De Candido)
Google Now for iOS Coming Soon?
Yep.
(Though I thought it was going to be a part of the Chrome iOS app. Or at least the Google Search app. But I’m all in favor of giving Now its own app — one of my favorite things out of Google in recent years.)
Update: It actually does look like it’s a part of the Google Search app in the video. And my understanding is that this is how it will work (coming up from the bottom). I still wouldn’t rule it out in Chrome down the road either.
Puerta del Sol, Madrid, Spain (at Puerta del Sol)
This Soccer Ball Generates Energy While You Play, And You Can Buy It Now
The Soccket is designed to replace kerosene lights in the developing world by converting games to electricity.
The Soccket, a soccer ball that generates and stores electricity during game play, was born in 2009. The ball was immediately a hit. For every 30 minutes of play, the ball can juice up an LED lamp for three hours, cutting down on toxic kerosene lamp use. Just plug an LED lamp into the light, and voila, free energy.
Uncharted Play has made some changes to the ball since it was first developed. The first iteration could be inflated and deflated, but it didn’t last long. The second ball was really heavy. The third ball wasn’t that heavy, but it was rigid and had a full-size gyroscope inside. The version available on Kickstarter (a standard Soccket and lamp goes for $99) is dense, water-resistant, made with a super light foam, and contains a fist-sized gyroscope.
“This version is significantly lighter and more efficient in terms of power generation. The only thing we couldn’t replicate in terms of a normal ball is the bounce. It was a tradeoff between wanting it to be hard or light with no bounce,” says Matthews.
In addition to the standard ball, Uncharted Play is offering tricked-out upgrades for backers if it reaches certain stretch goals in the Kickstarter campaign. One version has emergency cell phone charging capability, so users can charge their iPhones instead of a lamp. Another features a revision to the circuit board that tells players how much energy they have generated.
Human Language May Have Evolved from Bird Song
“The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language,” Charles Darwin wrote in “The Descent of Man” (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak. Language, he speculated, might have had its origins in singing, which “might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.”
Now researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the Univ. of Tokyo, say that Darwin was on the right path. The balance of evidence, they believe, suggests that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals.
Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/02/human-language-may-have-evolved-bird-song
(via fastcodesign)
HBO Go Finally A Go Over AirPlay
Ina Fried reporting on HBO’s Eric Kessler talking at AllThingsD’s D: Dive Into Media conference:
As for why the company doesn’t just get directly on Apple TV, Kessler said, “We will get on Apple TV, as we’ve said all along.”
I get why there would be a hold up putting HBO Go on Apple TV — Apple fully controls the apps that appear on that device and negotiating with Apple is never easy. But why did it take HBO this long to enable AirPlay in their app when rivals did it months ago? Leverage against Apple, I have to assume. (And now that it’s already been reported that HBO Go is coming directly to Apple TV, no more leverage required…)
It will be great to be able to watch HBO content on the Apple TV. But don’t forget that you still need that cable television subscription to get access to HBO Go in the first place. Which is fucking lame.
Also - Eric Kessler, HBO President said that they never want to become “your father’s Oldsmobile”. That was a close call, seeing as every other mobile video app has had Airplay enabled for months.
Vine - Your New Favorite App You Haven’t Heard Of Yet
This is one of the first Vines I made for my a cappella group. A lot of people have been calling Vine “Instagram for Video”, and that seems to be sort of accurate. Much like Twitter only gives you 140 characters to say you want to say, with Vine (which is owned by Twitter), you get six seconds of video to record, and it’s a simple as touching the screen when you want to record and letting go when you don’t.
There have already been tons of creative uses of it for all kinds of organizations. Some of the stop-motion animations I’ve seen are really impressive, other Vines are as simple as a cat sleeping by a window or people showing themselves making their dinner at the speed of light. There are no filters (yet) on Vine - so it leaves it up to the user to figure out what their six seconds of video is going to show.
Probably the coolest thing that has come out of Vine so far is vinepeek.com - it’s a continuous stream of Vines being posted all around the world. It’s about as close to an actual “window on the world” as you can get. Take a look and see for yourself how hard it is to close that tab.
This photo was taken at the Spice Souk. It’s a little bit overwhelming the first time you visit one of the more traditional Souks like this one. Every step you make you, a new friend is there suggesting that you take a look at their saffron or frankincense. It’s hard to turn away from their often convincing arguments about why you /must/ take home some of their spices and other trinkets- but they’re all very friendly- and extremely willing to haggle. Especially once you turn away to “leave”.
