Realized by Esteban Diácono using “Adobe After Effects, particular v2, soundkeys and a little starglow,” Let Yourself Feel is a short computer-generated animation featuring colored smoke dancing to the beautiful sound of Olafur Arnalds‘s music.
[Via Geekologie]
Don’t want to use Google’s services anymore? Then there’s only one thing left for you to do my friends: Move to Google’s brand new opt out village. Check it out:
A South Korean scientist who faked the production of a human embryo from cloned material is facing four years in jail over the incident.
Hwang Woo-Suk has been charged with embezzlement and with accepting funds under false pretences. That relates to the US $2.25 million he received from public funds to carry out the studies. He’s also charged with illegally buying human eggs.
Prosecutors say that as well as lying about the success of his work, Hwang diverted some of the public funding into bogus bank accounts opened in the names of friends.
The ensuing court case has taken three years so far, mainly because of the sheer complexity of the evidence from experts over whether Hwang’s scientific claims were genuine. The prosecution finished its case today and called for a four year jail term, saying his actions not only damaged the country’s scientific community, but brought international shame on South Korea. Hwang’s defense begins next month with a verdict expected by the end of the year.
Hwang claimed in 2004 that he had used cloning to make a human embryo and then recovered stem cells from it. A year later he said he’d been able to refine the process to make stem cells which genetically matched a patient; if true that could have made it possible to prevent the human body’s immune system from rejecting stem cell transplants.
A committee at Hwang’s employer, the Seoul National University, later concluded the latter claim was fake, while the former claim was dubious. Hwang was then barred from carrying out future research on human embryos. However, it has been independently confirmed that he carried out the work which produced the first cloned dog.
[Picture source: Flickr (CC)]
In the following video, deceased (1988) American physicist Richard Feynman amuses himself with an old puzzle – why do mirrors seem to switch left and right, but not top and bottom?
Anyone who has ever got stuck in the traffic for several hours during a hot summer day will definitely relate to this guy. Warning: video contains strong language.
This month Unix celebrates its 40th birthday. Though for being over the hill, the operating system just seems to be getting better with age… or at least it’s definitely not become obsolete.
In 1969, Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs who had previously been working on a larger operating system project when AT&T pulled the plug, wrote the core code of Unix in a month, or so the story goes. And especially when AT&T gave away the software for free, it took off in the academic community.
Of course, now we see Unix everywhere–from the servers that run the net to Sun’s Solaris to the guts of Mac’s OSX. And even systems that are just “Unix-like” might not exist if it weren’t for that month of coding in 1969. GNU might be a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix,” but the free software movement was largely influenced by Unix’s policies of online documentation and open access to source code.
So happy birthday… and many more.
Yes, you read that headline correctly, no need to rub your eyes. The following video features 3 bikini babes reading some parts of the Star Wars script for your, *ahem*, viewing enjoyment. Hey, It’s Star Wars… it’s bikini-clad girls… so uuuh, it has to be awesome… right? :)
If this isn’t enough for you, there’s another video of those girls reading some pulp fiction… and quite frankly, I think they’re doing a better job at it than in the Star Wars clip. Warning: This one contains strong language.
In the following video, Dr. Michio Kaku talks about the multiverse and parallel universes. If you liked the clip featured in our “Visualizing the Big Band” post, then you’ll definitely want to watch this one as well.
[Via Alana Taylor]
Many people, well, geeks, are participating in a Twitter meme where lyrics to well-known songs are rendered in computer code.
If you don’t get it: songsincode tries to display either a title of a song or part of its lyrics (as some songs are more known by the refrain than their title – for example there is no such thing as “all the lonely people” by The Beatles) in code. This could be PHP, JavaScript or any other language. For this, sad geeks clever people use code constructs like if statements and loops to describe conditions and repetition. If you don’t get it, don’t feel left behind, it is hard core geek.
Chris Heilmann has more examples.
[via b3ta]
Update: Check out the origins of the meme.
[Thanks, Andy!]