KODA

Tonight I read an article off reddit by alluringly titled: Common Benign Dog Tumor May Actually Be Ancient, Immortal Dog Turned into Virus. After reading the article completely, I am stunned… what a concept, cancer cells mutating and propagating into a communicable disease of their own! The real clincher is that the article suggests that this “transmissible tumor” has distinctly different DNA from its host body, which is proposed to have originated from a single dog or wolf several centuries ago! Do check out this article, because it is truly fascinating. This is a concept in biology I had neither heard nor concieved of before.

However, possibly even more interesting was Wikipedia’s page (linked in the article) on HeLa cells. According to Wikipedia, this is an “immortal cell line (it does not age) used in medical research and a proposed new single cell species […] derived from cervical cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks, who died from her cancer in 1951.”

More proof of the elegance of simplicity. Clicky clicky:

Schrodinger’s Comic

I haven’t laughed this hard in quite a while.

Here’s a fun little game I’ve been playing today. You might remember Flash Earth, a flash interface to the satellite imagery available through Google and Windows Live Local. While nifty, the one great limitation of this application is the almost complete lack of labels and location input in the interface. But this provides the perfect challenge for a game.

Take this app and find your home on Earth, from the completely zoomed out position, using only the imagery as your guide. Can you find it? Try to think of landmarks, find your city, and follow the streets. Pretend you’ve been abducted by aliens and are now trying to show them where to drop you off. Because heavens, you never know when such a skill could come in handy.

Now zoom out again and find the Empire State Building. The Great Pyramids of Egypt. The Eiffel Tower. Your old school.

Over the past few days I’ve become hopelessly addicted to the game Tremulous, ever since reading about it on NewsForge. While I originally thought of the NewsForge author’s opinion of Tremulous as “The best free software game ever” seemed a bit excessive, after trying it out and getting into the game, I have to agree. This is a seriously great game.

What piqued my interest was the fact that it was based on the Quake 3 engine, GPL’d, and would run on Linux. After downloading it and
giving it a spin, I must say I was shocked I had never heard of it before. It is possible that this is because the standalone 1.1.0 version was released less than 4 months ago, though with the quality and polish of this game, I would have expected to be seeing and hearing about it all over. The game looks and feels fantastic, and all of the graphics and user interfaces are very professionally designed. I really love the concepts of the buildings and units as well as the creativity shown in the popular maps, with tons of interesting and well-themed nooks and crannies. Tremulous also has a unique fast-paced mixture of Real Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter gameplay, which makes it fun but also strategically interesting.

I just fell through a Trapdoor, and I must say I won’t be coming back for a long time. A “Sketchbook for a group of programmers, graphic designers, psychologists, writers” — quite simply, this one of the most astounding groups of projects I have seen in a long time. There’s kiwi, “the wiki for sketching,” an editable (unfortunately shockwave driven) world of imagery in the style of MS-Paint… NodeBox, a fascinating bit of image generation on OSX using Python…

But by far most intriguing to me is Replica, a scarcely explained collection of full articles pertaining to art, design, computers, machine learning, consciousness, philosophy — the good stuff. And boy, is it good. I am amazed by “On artificial creativity”, where computer-generated art, words, artificial intelligence, and the internet meet. This is very interesting stuff, both artistically and conceptually. To me this seems to be the closest thing I’ve seen to a synthesis of modern philosophy, technology, art, and psychology. I am so impressed and inspired.

Oh, why are there such incredible people here on the internet?

Oh, so that’s how it’s done!

http://www.turnofftheinternet.com/

I just discovered Positive Negative… and wow. What a gorgeous photoblog.

I just love how each post tells a story. How each image is just large enough for me to get sucked in. How the site design is simple and clean enough to drive the experience forward. How instead of keeping a schedule, the artist posts when he has something real to share. How it makes me want to go to NYC…

This guy must truly take his camera everywhere. Beautiful, and very inspiring.

Yes! After so much work, Ton and all of the guys in the Orange Project have finally released their baby to the world.

This is incredible. Not only is Elephants Dream a high quality Creative Commons licensed short film (in HD 1920 and Surround Sound!), but it was made completely using Blender and other open source tools. And from the images, and their progress reports over the past year, it looks absolutely gorgeous.

My understanding is that the goal of the Orange Project was not simply to create an “Open Movie,” but to embody a symbiotic relationship between Blender development and real animation project. This has been a huge boon for the open source art community. Over the past year, they have created and documented some amazing new features and improvements to the Blender project, ones that will last far beyond the scope of their production. Which is not to say that their artistic creation won’t last for a long time to come.