The guys at MIT always come up with cool stuff. I’m wondering what it would take to do this in Flash. Probably the hardest thing would be recognizing the shapes. The actual physics part is rather straight forward.
You’ve probably already seen Johnny Lee ( Mr. 3D ) on youTube here, here, here, here, … you get the point.
Now you can see him presenting at TED.com.
This shot of volcanic lightning looks like a shot right out of a science fiction horror film but it’s a natural phenomenon. The story here gets the science a bit wrong. The process that creates the lightning is not from ionizing the atmosphere. It’s more likely to do with static buildup created from the ash particles brushing past each other in the turbulence.
Not many keyboards sell for over a grand. Then again, no other keyboard uses LEDs to create icons for each key on the keyboard either.
I love my current keyboard but there is one problem. I use a Dvorak keyboard layout so all the keys are mislabeled from my POV - except the a and m which are the same in both layouts. So, if this LED keyboard were to be reshaped as the Microsoft Natural keyboards are and the price came down in the, $300-$400 range then I’d seriously consider getting one.
The eternal question: How many monitors does it take to make a geek happy? We’ll, in my case one more than I had before. Now I’m up to a three monitor system and . . . oh my gods is it sweet. Now I have a 4.824 Mega Pixels display.
 |
The reason the colors look a little different is that I adjusted the background individually to try to balance out the different profiles on the monitors. It’s not perfect but pretty close.
The monitors themselves aren’t anything jaw dropping. I have two Dells and a Samsung. The two Dells both have a display of 1680×1050 pixels. But they are different physical sizes. The center display is a 22″ wide screen and the right display is a 20.1″ wide screen. The Samsung is a 19″ SynchMaster 940mw with a 1440×900 display.
Since I don’t play games on my PC - I have a Xbox 360 for that - I don’t really need snazzy monitors. I do a bit of graphics work but mostly I’m just coding. Boy is it nice having lots of room for panels and code and still have room for Winamp and other accessories that don’t have to be covered up all the time. And there are a number of times that I’m using all three monitors. I’ll have my Eclipse code/design on the center panel, output, help, etc. panels on the right and some XML document on the left. Now I don’t have to Alt-Tab back and forth so much.
 |
And of course you can see that I put in a bit of effort to get a spanning desktop background. What I did was use an Active Desktop and put an HTML file on each screen that is going full screen. The background of each HTML file is a portion of the background. It works great and as I develop some Flex widgets I have in mind I can drop them into the existing HTML and let them ride over the background and under my apps.
 |
I also had to get a second video card to get three monitor outputs. My Dell XPS came with the ATI Radeon X1300 Pro which is great. I just went to Frys electronics down the street and got the cheapest PCI Express card they had to give me the third output. Plugged it in, installed the drivers and it works like a charm. Which is good because I really didn’t feel like screwing around with troubleshooting dual video card conflicts. It’s really nice when things work the way they’re supposed to.
Power to the pixel!
This is an amazing photo of a funnel cloud and rainbow.
My early college career, and it was a career let me tell you, was focused mostly on mathematics, with a dash of physics and astronomy. Now as a Flash developer I’ve started getting back to my roots and enjoying Generative Art. I guess my first foray might be my Lightning project. You judge for yourself. Hopefully soon I’ll have more time to devote to this subject. Right now I think it’s 3rd or 4th on the list of projects to work on.
Here’s a few resources and examples:
once-upon-a-forest.com: work by Joshua Davis, I think.
AlgorithmicBotany.org: Lots and lots of technical papers on the subject from the University of Calgary.
Brian Cox gives a remarkably polished presentation at TED about the LHC and what it’s all about.
