Mike Davidson, proving once again that men with beards are very cool.

And I should know.

Right now it’s pricing at $148. Even if they couldn’t get the cost lower than that, this is a marvel of design & engineering; both in terms of hardware and software. Goes to show what can be done if enough people decide to make it so. Okay, enough people with the power, influence, and money… but still!

I’d buy one today. Or they could send me one. I wouldn’t mind that. I am interested to see what is the learning curve, and what are some of the drawbacks of the design.

Basically, this allows you to take black & white images and movies, add a few coloured squiggles to the areas of the picture you want coloured, then run it through MATLAB. But that’s just my math-fearing explanation of it.

In this paper we present a simple colorization method that requires neither precise image segmentation, nor accurate region tracking. Our method is based on a simple premise: neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors. We formalize this premise using a quadratic cost function and obtain an optimization problem that can be solved efficiently using standard techniques. In our approach an artist only needs to annotate the image with a few color scribbles, and the indicated colors are automatically propagated in both space and time to produce a fully colorized image or sequence. We demonstrate that high quality colorizations of stills and movie clips may be obtained from a relatively modest amount of user input.

Exactly. Squiggly lines of colour, then presto.

Especially interesting is the ability to do this to movies, which they have examples of on the site.

Emergency Landing Without Gear – video powered by Metacafe

It looks like a smoother landing than I’ve had on most of my flights, but of course that point of view is deceiving. Each shift and bump you feel as your body tried to keep up with the moving plane is far more freaky on the inside. A while ago, I was watching a travel show with Samantha Brown and they showed her plane landing. From the camera’s point of view (hence mine) it was moving around a bit in the cross-wind but seemed to do fine. When Samantha got off the plane she was visibly shaken saying it was the most terrifying landing of her life. And she travels a lot.

I really hate flying. Certainly I enjoy the convenience of getting places relatively quickly (once the plane actually takes off), but it just scares me anymore. I spend the whole flight imagining the wings falling off. It takes a lot of concentration to not go completely freaky and I always try to fall asleep no matter how short the flight.

Big planes bother me more than small ones. Which is completely backwards. Big planes fly higher therefore have more time to recover, if that is possible, from a problem in-flight. I have a friend who is a mechanic on small engine planes. He once said to me, “It’s amazing just how many things can be broken on a plane and it can still fly.”

Small comfort that.

Flickr Postcard Browser

Not at all accessible, but a fun way to view images from Flickr. Just type in a search term and use your Arrow Keys and Space Bar to navigate the results.

*Apparently very late. I found a blog post that’s similar to this one published in July of 2005. I stand by my “new to me” statement.

Volvo C30

More hi-res pics are avaliable in the c30world forum (registration might be required).

I so want this car. I pine for it. I pine for many things Swedish apparently. Volvos, fjords… There’s a build your own section within the C30 mini-site (Flash) where you can play with different C30 make ups. It’s a somewhat slow, but it allows me to dream. Take note of the slightly amusing loading-progress meter.

Why I <3 Volvo

My first car was a 1969 164. The thing went pretty much anywhere. Very tough. But it died of salt poisoning, being made of steel and living through Alaska winters (salted roads). My car’s name was Sasha. She was beautiful. I need a moment.

Actually, all my cars have started with V. I had a 1974 VW 412 wagon and now drive a stock 1998 VW Golf. Next car must be the C30.

This is a very cool demo and the fact that MIT is just down the street from me now is even more cool. Maybe I’ll saunter down there and see if I can play with it.

[Updated]

The guy in the video is Randall Davis, PhD (Stanford in artificial intelligence) and is currently the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research director. There’s a project page associated with this technology that points to a MIT/Microsoft collaboration. For use in their Tablet PC at least from a consumer perspective. They call it “Magic Paper.” Damn marketers… I prefer “Assist Sketch Understanding System.” Seriously. Why not call out across the lab, or conference room, “Hey guys… to demonstrate this better, maybe we should play with our ASUS?” I shoulda gone to business school; I woulda rawked!

Okay, okay. Offically, without marketing’s influence, it’s called ASSIST, A Shrewd Sketch Interpretation and Simulation
Tool. I like ASUS better. Maybe I should rethink that last sentence.

Here’s some extra reading on the topic at hand (PDFs):

• Speech and Sketching for Multimodal Design
• HMM-Based Efficient Sketch Recognition
• Dilemmas Faced by Creative People in IT Only slightly related, but interesting.

I recall using some aspects of this technology back in 1997 on my Apple Newton. There was no complex movement to be generated, but the system could correct my “almost triangle” into a real triangle.

Feel free to spend time crashing yo Jetta into a UFO, a giant tree, a chicken truck, and many others.

*How can horses help put a giant, broken man-egg back together again?

I love this return address sticker. Functional and fun.

The folks at flickr know exactly how you feel when you get something in the mail that isn’t a bill you have been expecting and will likely be excited to see.

Here’s an excerpt of Paul’s post on the particulars:

Many people have been wondering when the next round of submissions would be taking place for entry into the 9rules Network and I am happy to announce that we will open them up this Friday starting at 12:00 AM Eastern time. Once again we will only have the window for submissions open for 24 hours so if you are interested in joining make sure to get your entry in between 12:00AM and 11:59PM on July 1st.

We are looking for all types of content-based websites and if your site is different from what we currently offer our readers then even better.

We had some great sites join the first round and are looking to add more good content for our readers. Visits to this site increased by 500% and have stayed at about that level since this all started. This site doesn’t rake in the bucks for me, and even though I have ads, money isn’t the point. Having more traffic reinvigorated me to take better care of my blog. So now I write more often. Nothing like a bunch of people rifling through your stuff to clean up and dust off the fine, uh, china? Yeah, that simile just crashed and burned.

Sloppy similes aside, set your alarm for this Friday. We’ll have a link up for you to submit your site then. In the meantime, if you don’t know about 9rules, why not read the fab About page.