Last week an entry for the Best Illusion of the Year Contest called the Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion from Japan’s Kokichi Sugihara confused and delighted viewers all over the world. The video showed six plastic cylinders stuck together, and when they were placed in front of a mirror they inexplicably became squares. When the cylinders were rotated, the reflection finally turned into cylinders, only to have the actual plastic cylinders become squares. As if the amazing visual trick wasn’t impressive enough, Sugihara then outdid himself by adding several different types of groupings even more complicated and unbelievable than the original. It left almost everyone who saw it scratching their heads, and the internet was pretty desperate for answers.
Enjoy this VFX Sci-Fi Short Film… 2046. A new energy source, created to solve the world’s energy crisis, is believed to have deadly side effects. When The Signal’s inventor chooses to help a girl warn the public, he gains an unlikely ally to save the world from his own creation. Starring Michael Ealy and Grace Phipps, Written and Directed by Marcus Stokes!
On the web — http://www.thesignalmovie.com
This live action short film was shot in downtown Los Angeles over a weekend. The post production and visual effects took considerably longer and were done by the writer/director Marcus Stokes and a few additional VFX artists.
Starring: michael ealy, grace phipps, doc duhame, casey adams, zack duhame, brian buccellato, ciera payton, and gonzalo escudero.
Writer/director/vfx supervisor: marcus stokes executive producer: tim story producer: chris harding cinematographer: larry blanford editor: melissa lawson sound editor: stephen hunter flick music producer: bear mccreary composer: michael beach, jonathan ortega stunt coordinator: casey adams
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Good article overall; and yes QC is still evolving. However, to state Quantum networking is in its infancy is a wrong & misleading comment. Since 2009, Quantum Internet has been in beta at Los Alamos Labs. And, researchers will tell you that QC development can as far back as 1970s and the first official QC was introduced in 2009 when the first universal programmable quantum computer was introduced by University of Toronto’s Kim Luke.
Google has launched a two-year Chrome trial aimed at safeguarding the Internet against quantum computers, which security experts predict will shred all data.
New Semiconductor lasers — excellent news for Internet and medical technology.
Global stability analysis shows that new-generation semiconductor lasers may be dynamically more stable than conventional lasers despite having more degrees of freedom.
Semiconductor lasers are ubiquitous in everyday applications ranging from the Internet to medicine. Practically every laser application is affected by laser speed and stability properties. Stable operation is important for spectroscopy and optical clocks, while high-speed response is essential for optical communication schemes. When coupled to the outside world, or to one another (as in photonic integrated circuits), conventional semiconductor lasers often undergo instabilities that give rise to irregular and unpredictable oscillations in the intensity of the emitted light.1–3 These chaotic oscillations occur on a timescale of tens to hundreds of picoseconds and underpin modern laser applications, including instability-based sensing,4, 5 chaos-based secure optical communication,6 as well as ultrafast information processing,7 and random-number generation.
Biocomputing/ living circuit computing/ gene circuitry are the longer term future beyond Quantum. Here is another one of the many building blocks.
The tiny molecule responsible for transmitting the genetic data for every living thing on earth could be the answer to the IT industry’s quest for a more compact storage medium. In fact, researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington recently succeeded in storing 200 MB of data on a few strands of DNA, occupying a small dot on a test tube many times smaller than the tip of a pencil.
The Internet in a Shoebox.
Despite the small space occupied by the DNA strands, the researchers were nonetheless able to successfully store and retrieve high-definition digital video, the top 100 books from Project Guttenberg, and copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages.
Satya Nadella bounded into the conference room, eager to talk about intelligence. I was at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA, and the company’s CEO was touting the company’s progress in building more intelligent apps and services. Each morning, he told me, he puts on a HoloLens, which enables him to look at a virtual, interactive calendar projected on a wall of his house. Nadella appeared giddy as he described it. The system was intelligent, productive, and futuristic: everything he hopes Microsoft will be under his leadership.
No matter where we work in the future, Nadella says, Microsoft will have a place in it. The company’s “conversation as a platform” offering, which it unveiled in March, represents a bet that chat-based interfaces will overtake apps as our primary way of using the internet: for finding information, for shopping, and for accessing a range of services. And apps will become smarter thanks to “cognitive APIs,” made available by Microsoft, that let them understand faces, emotions, and other information contained in photos and videos.
Microsoft argues that it has the best “brain,” built on nearly two decades of advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, for delivering a future powered by artificial intelligence. It has a head start in building bots that resonate with users emotionally, thanks to an early experiment in China. And among the giants, Microsoft was first to release a true platform for text-based chat interfaces — a point of pride at a company that was mostly sidelined during the rise of smartphones.
You got to luv this one.
The security agency must defend itself in a US appeals court for violating the rights of a convicted bomber by supposedly illegally spying on him.
A US appeals court will weigh a constitutional challenge on Wednesday to a warrantless government surveillance program, brought by an Oregon man found guilty of attempting to detonate a bomb in 2010 during a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.
The case before a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals is the first of its kind to consider whether a criminal defendant’s constitutional privacy rights are violated under a National Security Agency (NSA) program that allows spying on Americans’ international phone calls and internet communications.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=r7YYAc9rq4g
A startup called Starry is shaking things up, attempting to provide a faster internet service that’s cheaper and hassle-free (and remarkably fast). Testing is set to begin in Boston.
Say goodbye to expensive internet coming in at slow speeds.
A new Boston startup called “Starry” is promising a tall order: delivering fast, affordable, wireless internet access to apartments and businesses. When they say fast, they mean it. The company says their wireless internet will be nearly 100 times faster than the average home connection.
Like the USPS; could we see a day when DARPA and IARPA positioned to be revenue generators like big tech? Granted these 2 programs are tax payer funded; however, so is USPS. One option is to for a contracted service fee; could DARPA &/ or IARPA charge fees to tech companies and others for using their technologies?
Two of the most important technological advances that helped fueled much of the country’s record economic growth in the post-WW II era were ubiquitous computing devices and modern communications technologies.
Indeed, most of the companies covered on TechCrunch certainly would not exist if not for the development and commercialization of microprocessors and the internet.
In my opinion, insufficient attention in the current ideological debate taking place in Silicon Valley and around the country has been given to the important role that government played throughout the lifecycle of these technologies. Understanding how these relatively mature technologies and industries were initially spawned and encouraged is critical to developing a strategy to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs in capital- or R&D-intensive industries with high growth potential.
