DIY telerobot for photographing wildlife

DIY telerobot for photographing wildlife:

Img Beetlecam-Wildlife-Photo-Robot-Lion-Closeup-1331226515393

Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas and his brother Matt devised a remote-controlled rover outfitted with a DSLR camera to get up close and personal with elephants, lions, and buffalo. After their first trip to Africa with their BeetleCam, they improved upon the design with a sturdier exoskeleton, telerobotic camera tilt, and HD video. The men have since gone back to Africa and captured some amazing lion images. If you want a BeetleCam of your own, they’ll custom build it for you starting at GBP £1,250. BeetleCam Project 2011 (via IEEE Spectrum)


Mathematical origami exhibit at UC Santa Cruz

[Oooooooh. -egg]
Mathematical origami exhibit at UC Santa Cruz:
Joisel-Origami-300

Chan-Origami-300

“Origami: Art + Mathematics” is a new exhibit opening at UC Santa Cruz on April 8. The exhibit is focused on computational origami, in honor of the late UCSC computer scientist and mathematical origami pioneer David Huffman. You may recognize some of the artists in the show from their appearance in the fantastic documentary film, “Between The Folds,” which apparently inspired this new exhibit. It runs through June 16 at the UCSC Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery. Above, two pieces from the show: (left) “Black Man” by Eric Joisel; (right) “Suigintu,” from “Rozen Maiden” anime and manga, by Brian Chan. “Origami exhibit at Cowell College“

A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

[An important reminder for older programmers; we grew up in a different world. -egg]

A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible:

Let’s say you’ve just bought a MacBook Air, and your goal is to become master of the machine, to understand how it works on every level.

Amit Singh’s Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach is a good place to start. It’s not about programming so much as an in-depth discussion of how all the parts of the operating system fit together: what the firmware does, the sequence of events during boot-up, what device drivers do, and so on. At 1680 pages, it’s not light summer reading.

To truly understand the hardware, Intel has kindly provided a free seven volume set of documentation. I’ll keep things simple by recommending Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual Volume 1: Basic Architecture (550 pages) and the two volumes describing the instruction set (684 pages and 704 pages respectively).

Objective-C is the language of OS X. We’ll go with Apple’s thankfully concise The Objective-C Programming Language (137 pages).

Of course Objective-C is a superset of C, so also work through the second edition of The C Programming Language (274 pages).

Now we’re getting to the core APIs of OS X. Cocoa Fundamentals Guide is 239 pages. Application Kit Framework Reference is a monster at 5069 pages. That’s help a file-like description of every API call. To be fair I’ll stop there with the Cocoa documentation, even though there are also more usable guides for drawing and Core Audio and Core Animation and a dozen other things.

Ah, wait, OpenGL isn’t part of Cocoa, so throw in the 784 page OpenGL Reference Manual. And another 800 pages for OpenGL Shading Language, Second Edition.

The total of all of this is 79 pages shy of eleven thousand. I neglected to include man pages for hundreds of system utilities and the Xcode documentation. And I didn’t even touch upon the graphics knowhow needed to do anything interesting with OpenGL, or how to write good C and Objective-C or anything about object-oriented design, and…

(If you liked this, you might enjoy Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than.)

Winged, kinetic rings that flap

Winged, kinetic rings that flap:

Jeweler/metalworker Dukno Yoon makes beautiful, animated kinetic winged rings, sculptures and towers that flap when you flex your finger.


The contrast between metal structural form and natural feather, together with the repetitive and whimsical movements of fragile wings, provokes the imagination and evolves the intimate relationship between work and viewer/wearer.

Although the recent series, segmented wings have been focused on the formal challenge to engineer an intricate movement that simulates bird wings,

these works are intended to be a series of poems in which I develope my own formal language, interpret the nature of wings, create various structural forms with movements, and share the metaphor, imagination, humor, with viewer/wearer.

Wings)

(via Craft)


Ten stone baby teased with chocolate

[Odd. -egg]

Ten stone baby teased with chocolate:

Entertainment in 1935. “The trouble is nowadays he refuses to be weighed at all so we don’t really know if he’s solid or hollow.”

[Video Link]

Ten Stone Baby, a British Pathe newsreel from 1935.

Despite the newsreel’s original title “Ten Stone Baby”, the boy Leslie Downes is actually 3-years-old. Seen with his parents in a kind of pen, Leslie is sat in an armchair. Somebody then dangles a bar of chocolate into the pen and he immediately sets to work at fetching it.

We also see Leslie playing with bricks.