techyum ::

Wups. Snip:

A three-metre (10ft) python has killed a student zookeeper who let the snake out of its enclosure in Venezuela while working a night shift at the zoo.
Horrified colleagues at the Caracas zoo had to beat the snake to make it release the body of Erick Arrieta, whose head it was swallowing, local media reported.
Marks on the biology student’s wrist suggested the snake had bitten him before crushing him to death.
The intern, 29, had been supervising the section alone when he broke zoo rules by opening the snake’s cage, according to press reports. (… read a little bit more, Independent UK)

It’s insanely stupid that I *can’t* embed the video player that shows one of the biggest video animation breakthroughs I’ve seen to date — the woman in the video is not a real person — and it’s really, really hard to tell. I call lamesauce on Times Online UK for not allowing embedded players — like, duh. Still, you have to see Emily is not human. Snip:

Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology.
Emily – the woman in the above animation – was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated.
She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as ‘uncanny valley’ – which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.
Researchers at a Californian company which makes computer-generated imagery for Hollywood films started with a video of an employee talking. They then broke down down the facial movements down into dozens of smaller movements, each of which was given a ‘control system’.
The team at Image Metrics – which produced the animation for the Grand Theft Auto computer game – then recreated the gestures, movement by movement, in a model. The aim was to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical.
“Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real,” Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer of Image Metrics, said.
“The subtlety of the timing of eye movements is a big one. People also have a natural asymmetry – for instance, in the muscles in the side of their face. Those types of imperfections aren’t that significant but they are what makes people look real.”
Previous methods for animating faces have involved putting dots on a face and observing the way the dots move, but Image Metrics analyses facial movements at the level of individual pixels in a video … (…read more, Times Online UK)

Take note of some interesting stuff on ZDNet from Intel’s CTO about the future of kooky science fiction nanobots:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–Mobile phones in future could be thumb-sized in pockets, and in practically an instant, be effortlessly transformed into PDA-sized devices to send e-mail.
In the final keynote of the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) Thursday, Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, shed some light on work around programmable matter, as he teased the audience with what Intel believes would apply as technology in the next four decades.
The idea of programmable matter, he explained, revolves around tiny glass spheres with processing power and photovoltaic for generating electricity to run the tiny circuitry. These particles called catoms would move relative to one another via electrostatic.
The concept of programmable matter can be thought of as “the ultimate form of digital printing”, Rattner told ZDNet Asia Wednesday in an interview. “You literally could make an object of any imaginable shape, or design an object of any imaginable shape, and simply ‘hit the print command’ and the matter would take that shape.
“[The late] Arthur C. Clarke (famed British author and inventor) had this wonderful quote: ‘Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.’ And that’s what programmable matter is–it’s a technology so advanced it might as well be magic,” he said.

Link.
I find Mr. Rattner referencing Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum kinda inappropriate here — probably because I think Clarke is completely wrong in terms of real-world technology, though absolutely correct in terms of science fiction (which is, I believe, how he meant it when he said it). But it makes for a good soundbite.
A few days ago, I encountered a crescent wrench produced by a 3D printer. These devices are used for prototyping, and are kinda similar to laser printers. Laser printers use little particles of stuff to put printing on paper; 3D printers use little filaments to put 3D objects into space. The crescent wrench I saw actually had moving parts.
Image: Nanotech Foglet, single particle of hypothesized utility fog, a type of nanobot swarm of tiny robots working together. Public domain, by Steven Martin, from Wikipedia.

This gallery of Tokyo Metro’s public transit “good manners” signs is excellent, though I wish it were larger. (via ffffound!)

I have a feeling there’s a lot more like this going on than we know about. First, that they had enough reasons to need to create special “protest areas” around the Olympics — next that the applicants for permits to protest (anything) have been disappeared. WTF? Snip:

BEIJING — Two elderly Chinese women have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas, according to family members and human rights advocates.
Seventy-nine-year-old Wu Dianyuan, right, and her neighbor Wang Xiuying, 77, waited to apply for a protest permit outside a public security bureau in Beijing on Monday. They were later sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor.”
The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, had made five visits to the police this month in an effort to get permission to protest what they contended was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing.
During their final visit on Monday, public security officials informed them that they had been given administrative sentences for “disturbing the public order,” according to Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son.
Mr. Li said his mother and Ms. Wang, who used to be neighbors before their homes were demolished to make way for a redevelopment project, were allowed to return home but were told they could be sent to a detention center at any moment. “Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” he asked. He said Ms. Wang was nearly blind.
A man who answered the phone at the Public Security Bureau declined to give out information about the case.
At least a half dozen people have been detained by the authorities after they responded to a government announcement late last month designating venues in three city parks as “protest zones” during the Olympics. So far, no demonstrations have taken place.
According to Xinhua, the state news agency, 77 people submitted protest applications, none of which were approved. Xinhua, quoting a public security spokesperson, said that apart from those detained all but three applicants had dropped their requests after their complaints were “properly addressed by relevant authorities or departments through consultations.” The remaining three applications were rejected for incomplete information or for violating Chinese law.
The authorities, however, have refused to explain what happened to applicants who disappeared after they submitted their paperwork. Among these, Gao Chuancai, a farmer from northeast China who was hoping to publicize government corruption, was forcibly escorted back to his hometown last week and remains in custody.
Relatives of another person who was detained, Zhang Wei, a Beijing resident who was also seeking to protest the demolition of her home, were told she would be kept at a detention center for a month. Two rights advocates from southern China have not been heard from since they were seized last week at the Public Security Bureau’s protest application office in Beijing. (…read more, NYT)

Not only are the dozens of fucking awesome wire robots at Toyolink simply the coolest items of shelf-filling want I’ve seen in ages, but a browse through their store comes with a strong *warning* that you will be there for at least an hour. Here is more of their adorable wantness. Sigh. (link via Cliff’s)

Over at Pink Tentacle the latest breakthrough in stretchable circuitry is explored, which will be incredible for potential in all kinds of things like soldiers and space suits — but I think it’s getting us closer to Blade Runner Replicant dreamland every day. Snip:

In a technological advance that opens up new possibilities in the fields of robotics and wearable computing, researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a stretchable, rubbery material that conducts electricity and can be incorporated into electronic devices.
The researchers — led by assistant professor Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo — were able to create elastic electronic circuits that could be stretched up to 1.7 times their original size without affecting performance, thanks to conductive wires made from a new carbon nanotube-polymer composite they developed. (…) For robots, elastic electronic circuits will enable layers of soft, sensor-laden skin to be stretched tightly across the curves of their bodies, giving them both a more lifelike appearance and greater sensitivity to touch. (…read more.)

It’s all about “soft machines”. After reading that, watch these two Japanese gynoid videos and let your mind wander where mine has. Someone should really fund my research labs, doncha think?

“Do not touch my breast” via.

Insect repellent gynoid commercial via.

Okay, so maybe it just looks like a crack pipe, and I’m a coffee fiend… But Handpresso at Charles and Marie is everything I need to make sure I always have a shot of espresso, whether I’m lagging in the machine shop, doing this thing I heard if once called “camping” or stranded at the usual tech/sex/microcontrollers conference of doom I tend to find myself at. (via)

I’ve always hated internet number gaming, and thought anyone who put stock in things like Alexa are dopes. Anyone with a site knows to look at their own stats and compare the reality to those pagerank guessing mindfuck sites knows that there’s what things like Alexa says, and then there are what your own stats actually say. And there’s numbers — and there’s influence. Then there are the ad- and tech-authorities’ various arguments about views and the bullshit blogs pull to get clickthroughs for ads and impressions, and the debate in vlogging over pre- vs. mid- vs. post-roll, and while sure, *some* people are making lotsa money, it’s still all bullshit and conjecture. And guessing and gaming. I know from personal experience. And shit like Pay Per Post = FAIL. And remember when everyone thought you had to own exactly the URL of your brand or company to “make it”? Anyone could see ten miles away that it was content and meaning and authenticity and a human face and and delivery of goods/information to rise to the top — and stay there. Think about all the number gaming that has failed. The pagerank era is dying.
Still no one knows what the fuck they’re doing. And I may be broke, but I’m having fun. But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s not *how many people* read your blog, it’s *who* reads your blog. The future is personality driven, and rocket-fueled by meaning. And that’s where the money will go, too.
That’s all my theory behind what makes this Data Mining post The End of PageRank so interesting:

(…) Of all the discussions, ideas and brainstorming that went on, one thing really seemed to emerge as a clear near/mid-term goal: transition from a web of documents to a web of people. I think this has been on the minds of many in both the research and industrial sphere. Issues of trust, influence, authority when applied to the web are essentially people based issues, the content being in a sense an artifact of these individuals. The PageRank era is marked by a very simple link with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption (a positive endorsement). Things are about to change! (…read all.)

Real elf ears = real elf fears. This Instructable has lots of unusual body modification advice, and shows step-by-step how Kimmie had her ears cut, stitched and healed to have real-life elf ears. Le whoa. (thanks, Eve!) Link to her LiveJournal. She did it with the help of Body Modification Artist, Russ Foxx. Here’s the slideshow gallery embed: