Frets on Fire

"If you cannot get enough of Guitar Hero while playing on your home console then Frets On Fire is a great way to get a similar experience on your computer. Frets on Fire is a cross-platform Open Source project.

You can download and install Frets on Fire on a Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X box. There is also a portable version which ensures you can get your guitar gaming fix any where there is a computer."

http://blogs.howtogeek.com/mysticgeek/2009/04/10/geek-fun-frets-on-fire/


http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/


http://www.fretsonfire.net/forums/

Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London

"It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/24/espresso-book-machine-launches/print

Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library

"Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker's library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer ... is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy."

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker?currentPage=all

Artist Sara Watson turns her old Skoda Fabia into an 'invisible car'

"The University of Central Lancashire artist made the incredible optical illusion by spray painting a battered Skoda Fabia to match the car park and entrance to her art studio."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1176328/Artists-turns-old-Skoda-Fabia-invisible-car.html

Sean Kenney Builds a Huge Nintendo DSi Using LEGO

"The sculpture took over 200 hours to design and build, and was done over the course of about 2 weeks together with two of my assistants. It contains 51,324 LEGO pieces, all of which are available in regular off-the-shelf LEGO products. (Yes, kids, you too can do this at home!) :) The final sculpture has giant-sized versions of every detail, from the screws on the battery cover to the electrical contacts in the power port. The tiny SD card slot is over a foot tall!"

http://pixelatedgeek.com/2009/04/sean-kenney-builds-a-huge-nintendo-dsi-using-lego-with-interview/


http://www.seankenney.com/

Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal

"Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them."

http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/

Unifying The Animate And The Inanimate Designs Of Nature

"Living beings and inanimate phenomena may have more in common than previously thought."

http://www.physorg.com/news160153064.html

"What they believe connects the two worlds is a theory that flow systems - from animal locomotion to the formation of river deltas -- evolve in time to balance and minimize imperfections. Flows evolve to reduce friction or other forms of resistance, so that they flow more easily with time."

Higher Dimensions from String Theory

"String Theory predicts the existence of more than the 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension we are all familiar with. According to string theory, there are additional dimensions that we are unfamiliar with because they are curled up into tiny complicated shapes that can only be seen on tiny scales. If we could shrink to this tiny, Planck-sized scale we could see that at every 3D point in space, we can also explore 6 additional dimensions. This animation shows a Calabi-Yau surface which is a projection of these higher dimensions into the more familiar dimensions we are aware of."

http://members.wri.com/jeffb/visualization/stringtheory2.shtml

Face Mining: Finding Who and When in Video

"Here we illustrate the face mining concept for the TV series Star Trek. Specifically, we applied our state-of-the art algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition to 67 Star Trek episodes over three seasons. This process automatically extracts all visible face tracks, and clusters these into a small number of same-person groupings. Currently, we recognize frontal or near-frontal tracks. In the near future, we will extend our results to non-frontal tracks as well."

http://facemining.pittpatt.com/

My Four-Legs Walking-Machine

http://www.armure.ch/WALKING.htm

Are running shoes a waste of money?

"'But I believe that when my runners train barefoot they run faster and suffer fewer injuries.' "

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1170253/The-painful-truth-trainers-Are-expensive-running-shoes-waste-money.html

Newly Discovered Iron-breathing Species Have Lived In Cold Isolation For Millions Of Years

"Chemical analysis of effluent from the inaccessible subglacial pool suggests that its inhabitants have eked out a living by breathing iron leached from bedrock with the help of a sulfur catalyst. Lacking any light to support photosynthesis, the microbes have presumably survived by feeding on the organic matter trapped with them when the massive Taylor Glacier sealed off their habitat an estimated 1.5 to 2 million years ago."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090416144512.htm