Drewbot

Sony May Make A-Mounts Fully Mirrorless in 2014

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:37:39 -0400

Sony May Make A-Mounts Fully Mirrorless in 2014:

The beginning of SLR/Mirrorless consolidation.

“Sailors move an X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS)...

Sat, 18 May 2013 16:20:52 -0400

“Sailors move an X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) demonstrator on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush” (via Navy News Service)

Williamsburg, early afternoon.

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:10:00 -0400

Williamsburg, early afternoon.

"Sponsored Content Pretty Fucking Awesome"

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:23:56 -0400

"Sponsored Content Pretty Fucking Awesome":

Via The Onion

Photo

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:31:16 -0400

Photo

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:22:19 -0400

Kepler’s Greatest Hits (via Wired.com)

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:18:40 -0400

Kepler’s Greatest Hits (via Wired.com)

While catching up on the IRS news these last few days there’s one stumbling block I...

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:58:20 -0400

While catching up on the IRS news these last few days there’s one stumbling block I can’t get past: we’re upset and surprised the IRS selectively scrutinized a political party named after a tax rebellion.

Photo

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:05:57 -0400

Before Kepler We Knew Only a Handful of Planets

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:42:00 -0400

Before Kepler We Knew Only a Handful of Planets:

RIP Kepler, the exoplanet finding telescope satellite:

Very few experiments have changed the way we perceive our Universe, but the Kepler exoplanet survey telescope is one such example. Simply by monitoring a single patch of the sky continuously, it provided a new understanding of how many planets exist in the galaxy. Since its launch in 2009, Kepler identified 115 exoplanets with over 2,700 other potential planet candidates—including a number that are comparable in size to Earth or orbiting within the habitable zone where liquid water might exist.

However, Kepler is an orbiting telescope, unreachable by spacecraft for repairs. Today, NASA announced that a reaction wheel—required to keep the telescope pointed steadily in one direction—ceased functioning. This is the second reaction wheel failure, meaning Kepler can’t continue to monitor the same stars and their exoplanets it has watched since 2009.

(Via Ars)

One-third of All Smartphone Sales were Prepaid in Q1

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:24:09 -0400

One-third of All Smartphone Sales were Prepaid in Q1:

CNET:

“For consumers looking at prepaid phones today, value does not equate with finding phones that are cheap or obsolete,” NPD Vice President Stephen Baker said in a statement. “In fact, the Galaxy S2 and the iPhone 4S, two of the top five prepaid smartphone models in 2013, were among the top-selling phones overall just one year earlier.”

Simulation Supplements for Urban Childhoods

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:38:38 -0400

Simulation Supplements for Urban Childhoods:

Nick Paumgarten on Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto:

In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world. “I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish,” he told me one day. “That’s something that I just can’t express in words. It’s such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it’s not very easy.”

(Via The New Yorker)

The evolution of the iPhone camera

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:31:40 -0400

The evolution of the iPhone camera

taylordavidson: Something I created the other day: The...

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:54:24 -0400

taylordavidson:

Something I created the other day: The Photography Industry Landscape

Taylor structures the entropy of the photo industry much better than myself.

How many of these boxes will roll up into the camera?

Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter on Samples, Creating Samples, and Studio Production

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:46:12 -0400

Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter on Samples, Creating Samples, and Studio Production:

It’s really hard to say. The whole starting point of that record was to somehow question the magical powers of recorded audio at a time when pop music is mostly recorded on laptops with a small microphone and a pair of headphones in airport lounges and hotel rooms. We’re not really part of that generation. We’re part of the previous generation, where a studio was a collection of hardware and electronic components assembled in a discreet way to try to create a unique global system in a home environment; somehow a distinctive system.

The idea was really having this desire for live drums, as well as questioning, really, why and what is the magic in samples? Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these little snippets of audio from vinyl records? What kind of magic did it contain? Because harmonically the samples are just an F minor or a G flat, something not so special. It occurred to us it’s probably a collection of so many different parameters; of amazing performances, the studio, the place it was recorded, the performers, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then. It was not an easy task, but took a certain craftsmanship somehow cultivated at the time.

We started to say, “OK, let’s see from a production standpoint, also in terms of performance, whether we could create records that embed this level of production and craftsmanship, and see whether the culture would allow for records like this to be produced. ”So it’s true that we decided to try to recreate these circumstances and really select a team of firsthand actors in witness of that golden age, that era and in the same time go back to the places where that magic had happened. We really think, we feel the walls can speak, and at the same time there’s really this idea that these are magical places.

Above are the before and after shots of a fire near Camarillo,...

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:17:00 -0400

Above are the before and after shots of a fire near Camarillo, CA which started May 2nd and burned more than 24,000 acres.

The images above are falsely colored, to reflect the multiple spectrums of information being captured:

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), the newest Landsat satellite, passed over the Springs Fire on May 4, 2013. In the false-color images above from LDCM’s Operational Land Imager (OLI), unburned vegetation appears dark green. Burned areas are red, and the most severely burned areas are generally the darkest. Actively growing farmland is light green; plowed fields are brown. Buildings and roads are gray. Note that the image is rotated so that north is to the right.

Can’t wait for such augmented vision technologies to trickle down into consumer cameras and smartphones. (Via NASA)

No one launches like Daft Punk.

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:21:00 -0400

No one launches like Daft Punk.

"As to why doctors were reporting inaccurate causes of death, it actually appears to be a weirdly..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 22:09:38 -0400

“As to why doctors were reporting inaccurate causes of death, it actually appears to be a weirdly bureaucratic reason: three-quarters said the system they use in New York City would not accept what they thought to be the real cause of death. So they put in something else instead. Other reasons for reporting the wrong cause of death that turned up in the survey included “My attending told me to put something else” and “I did not know why the patient died/I took my best guess.””

- Sarah Kliff, on the inaccuracies of death certificates.

colchrishadfield: With deference to the genius of David Bowie,...

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:12:53 -0400

colchrishadfield:

With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World.

Huge thanks in the making of the video to the talented trio of Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran and Andrew Tidby, plus Evan Hadfield and all at the CSA.

Space folk songs of the future.

CPUs just count. All the hardware we put around them and software we write aim to turn non-counting...

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:43:25 -0400

CPUs just count. All the hardware we put around them and software we write aim to turn non-counting problems into counting problems.