Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek
Many exciting real-world beginnings and endings going on here, leading to next to no online-world time for me, but in a good way. Thank goodness it’s summer with the longer days and wonderful sunshine. There really is nothing quite like a summer day in upstate New York. Hopefully I’ve hit a bit of a lull for the next few weeks. I’ve been neglecting all of my web projects horribly over the past months. It’s good to be back!
The toxic substances in computers don’t just require careful recycling of old PCs, but the dust that accumulates on computers contains potentially dangerous elements from fire retardants (PBDE’s). Says the article: The researchers claim that the PBDE threat is greatest in North America, where women were found to have the highest levels of the chemicals present in their breast milk, and that PBDE levels are doubling in the U.S population every two to five years. The flame retardants are found not only in computers, but also in other commonly used electronics devices, including televisions and radios. Frightening the ways in … Continue reading Toxic PCs
If the previous pairing doesn’t do it for you, try this one — computer science and hockey, joined in the task of using computer vision to track, process, and transmit the content of visual events, distilling it down to the relevant pieces. Says the primary researcher: “This could have many different applications, including most situations that require a human to monitor video taken by a remote camera, such as security cameras,” Boyd says. “But it could also be used to deliver a live sports event to your cell phone. Instead of video, which requires a lot of bandwidth, you would … Continue reading Object Tracking
Everything you could want in a news story — old world crafts, commercial innovation, and sex — is wrapped together in this article about traditional Polish lace makers selling handmade lace G-strings instead of the more usual but poorer-selling alter clothes and doilies. If you follow the link in the article to the town’s website, you can see their gorgeous “stringis” (warning: photos of underwear … of course). The quality of the lace making seems, from the photos, to be phenomenal.
Heh – What Should I Do If The Internet Goes Down?, a ten step helpful handbook. Also fun is this flash game where you attack aliens by blowing up jeeps at them. [via #!/usr/bin/girl]