“…It’s called the Blue Brain project, and it’s an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM’s Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram’s team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat’s brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you’d then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?)”

Seems like it would not take more than 18 years.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.html#ixzz1YkGrvDLj

Check this new awesome promo video for Sir Sampleton!!! by John Michael Boling, Javier Morales, Julian Bozeman, and John Crowe. Also, Paddy Johnson did an interview with John Michael and me about this.

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I just released my second app for iPhone/iPad called Magic Carpet. The app is partly an artwork, but it also doubles as a musical instrument, a hypnosis and meditation tool, a toy, a VJ app, etc. It displays collages of quickly spinning rugs and quilts accompanied by sounds or music generated from a software binaural beat synthesizer and sample player. It can also play music from the device’s music library, and it has a musical instrument mode.

Magic Carpet supports Apple’s composite, component, and VGA cables on the iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4, and iPad. This enables you to run the app on your iPhone and display the output on a TV or video projector, which is cool. The capability of these devices to output video has a lot of potential for interesting apps.

The app is a buck, you can get it by searching for “Magic Carpet” in the App Store.

Demo vids below, and more vids here.

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This is a rough demo of a new iPhone music app that I plan to release in a few weeks. It’s a sort of musical instrument/meditation tool/artwork. The patterns are made from images of spinning quilts and rugs, and the audio is shifting loops of contemporary Christian music played backwards. The final version will have more advanced sound control and several modes with different samples, spin patterns, and sound options. I will probably also be porting it to Android.

I wrote a script that takes the lifetime of the cellular automaton Conway’s Game of Life and extrudes it into a three dimensional object. The script is written in Python and runs within the Golly cellular automata simulator. Time is equated to the Z-axis, and every live cell/pixel is converted to a cube, output as raw vertices in a text file that can be opened in Blender, an open source 3D graphics program. Because the script inefficiently renders every individual cube into a text file, I’m currently unable to render objects that are much larger or more complex than the images below. Optimizations to the script like combining faces, eliminating hidden faces, and switching to a binary vector file format should eventually reduce this problem.

Download the script here.

To use the script, you’ll need Python, Golly, and Blender. Run Golly, load or draw your starting pattern, then choose Run Script in the File menu and find my script. Enter the number of layers to render; initially try around 10 for large patterns, 100 for small patterns. The script will create a file called 3dlife.raw which you can import into Blender with File->Import->Raw Faces. On my computer, Blender will struggle or crash if the raw file is much more than 150MB.

examples rendered with LuxRender:

Awesome DIY article about FPS and human eye perception.

Check this site for this guy who has a restored set of the Showbiz Pizza animatronic band and is choreographing recent songs with the setup. He’s taking bids for new songs to program new choreography which he videotapes and puts on youtube.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor’s_algorithm

I made a myspace for my band from the mid 90’s.

via slashdot. The user comments are more interesting than the article. scroll down.

I’m so, so tripping [youtube.com]

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/fractals/animated/?C=M;O=A