Featured 3D Short: Samurai

Produced by the folks at RealtimeUK, the following animation was first made in 3dsmax and then rendered in Vray. Lastly, post-production visuals were added via After Effects. Let’s just say that the end result is quite stunning, to say the least. Check it out:



Former officials play a very modern war game

A four hour cyber-war simulation suggests the United States response could be severely lacking if such an event became reality.

The Cyber Shockwave event, organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center, says that new laws are needed to give the federal government greater controls over privately controlled computers in the event of an attack. It also called for international agreement on what is and is not acceptable in terms of cyber-attacks during military conflicts.

The simulation involved ten former politicians and officials playing the roles of their contemporary equivalents. The scenario centered on a March Madness app (based on the annual NCAA basketball tournaments) which turned out to house some big-time malicious software. In turn these caused problems for the Internet itself.

The biggest stumbling block appeared to be that there are serious legal questions about whether the government has the legal power to close down cellphone networks. Participants noted that closing these networks might be necessary if failing to do so could have a knock-on effect on communications in general.

At the later stages of the simulation, other problems such as two homemade bombs on power stations and a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast were added. It’s arguable how realistic that would be, but the point of the exercise seemed to be that if the communications networks were compromised, the government reaction to other problems would be severely hampered.

Speaking to BusinessWeek, former CIA acting director John McLaughlin noted the problems were as much political as technical: “You’re stuck with incredible ambiguity and lousy choices. Generally, this is how government works.”



Contest: Help Us Design a T-Shirt, Get a T-Shirt + a $25 Gift Certificate!

Hey everyone, since we haven’t done any contests in a while, we thought of a little something to let you guys have a bit of fun. The idea is to think about some cool geeky quotes that would make for some interesting t-shirt designs. Just leave your suggestions in the comments section below, and early next week, we’ll pick the 4 best ones. Each winner will then get one official Geeks are Sexy t-shirt (pictured top on [GaS] reader Phil) plus a $25 gift certificate to spend with our pals at Splitreason.com.

…and now, we’re all anxiously waiting for you guys to blow us away with your wit!

Verizon Sinks Its Fangs into AT&T

Here’s yet another Verizon commercial taking a shot at AT&T’s coverage. A spoof of Twilight, this one suggests that you might just lose the eternal love of your vampire soulmate if your download speeds aren’t fast enough.

But I think the real issue here is this new twist on the vampire/werewolf debate. Is Verizon suggesting that wolves are less tech-savvy than vampires? Or maybe werewolves are just less shallow, able to look beyond how (blood) red your cellphone coverage map is.

Warp Speed Kills

An article at NewScientist tells of the deadly effects of traveling at or near light speed, citing a presentation by William A. Edelstein, Ph.D, a professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (“I’m a doctor, not a physicist!”). He uses Einstein’s special theory of relativity to explain how the human body could not survive the warp speeds depicted in Star Trek. The culprit is the matter surrounding the ship, sparse as it is.

Special relativity describes how space and time are distorted for observers traveling at different speeds. For the crew of a spacecraft ramping up to light speed, interstellar space would appear highly compressed, thereby increasing the number of hydrogen atoms hitting the craft.Worse is that the atoms’ kinetic energy also increases. For a crew to make the 50,000-light-year journey to the center of the Milky Way within 10 years, they would have to travel at 99.999998 percent the speed of light. At these speeds, hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts – the same energy that protons will eventually reach in the Large Hadron Collider when it runs at full throttle. “For the crew, it would be like standing in front of the LHC beam,” says Edelstein.

My first thought was how this effect would make a cool science fiction movie by itself. Other geeks had different reactions, ranging from “Duh” to “But but but what about…” Some selected comments about the aricle:

In fact the ship would have a bow shock wave in front of it and micro-meteorites would tend to get vaporised anyway. Large boulders (extremely rare) would have to be navigated around.The Bussard Ramjet proposal discussed in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos not only deflects the induced radiation, but also utilizes the interstellar hydrogen as a fuel.

The Romulan D’deridex-class warbirds of Star Trek’s 24th century (in the original fiction timeline, not the alternate created by the actions of Nero in the latest movie) were powered by a forced quantum singularity.

Well the hydrogen is one thing but kicking into warp speed anywhere near a magnetic field (such as a planet like earth) would probably melt whatever metal or anything even vaguely conductive in the craft through the induced eddy currents (ie. moving a conductor in a magnetic field). That would include the human bodies….

The Alcubierre drive, which is the theoretical basis for “warp” drive using Einstein’s General Relativity has many problems. However, the main idea behind the Alcubierre drive is that star vessels have no need of traveling near the speed of light. In fact, there is no real need for standard propulsion at all since what the theory seems to show is that space-time can be compressed in front of the “ship” and stretched behind it — hence the warp. The result of that warping of space-time is that distant locations in front become closer, while the location the ship once occupied become farther. The ship itself is not moving much at all relative to local distance markers. So, light-speed travel is not an issue.

Now see, this is the kind of stuff you pick up by watching Star Trek and hanging around on the internet. And all my kids want to do is read books and play soccer.

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Amazing Freestyle Juggler

What you’re about to see is a video of Marek Born doing what he does best: Juggling. This kid is truly amazing. Check him out:

A Date with a Dragon Down the Carpal Tunnel

So you might have noticed that I’ve gone quiet the last couple of weeks. All signals have been cut, so to speak, since I’ve got the geeky equivalent of a mogul skier’s torn ACL: that is, carpal tunnel syndrome (or, perhaps, RSI).

It blows. In every respect it sucks. It’s all-encompassing pain, and it’s a constant reminder of how often I use my hands and, unfortunately, how I’ve neglected to take care of them. Even though carpal tunnel is typically aggravated by genetic predisposition (which I’ve got: thanks Mom, thanks Grandma) there are a great any things you can do and use to avoid it, including exercises, posture, and gadgets. But it still takes time to heal. Not good news for a writer, y’know?

Even though my hands are improving slowly, I still can’t type for very long and I have to be extremely careful about the surface I’m typing on. For example, I learned that the laptop on the kitchen table method (my usual approach) is entirely out for me. Talk about excruciating pain! Although I certainly want to be able to make an investment in my writing career, the timing of this injury is terrible. Day by day I have been finding myself more and more frustrated with the lack of progress. The pain just hasn’t wanted to go away, in spite of the fact that I’ve been resting, taking NSAIDs, and wearing arm splints (which do not make me look like Wonder Woman, no matter how much I squint).

It’s been a humbling experience to say the least. I’m used to being able to do everything at once, to multitask, to be a mom, wife, writer—I typically cough up over 2K words a day between fiction and blogging. At this rate it’s been hard enough just to get daily routine accomplished (laundry, cooking, childrearing: all painful!).

As soon as I realized that the recovery was going to take quite a while, I started looking into software that might make my life easier. One of the predominant names in dictation software is Dragon, which, despite its rather geeky name is pretty business-oriented. People in the health care business often rely on software like Dragon Naturally Speaking in order to dictate large amounts of notes from doctors.

In spite of all the good reviews of Dragon, one of the difficult issues has to do with the fact that it is a heck of a lot of money for me to consider spending at the moment, no matter how much my hands hurt. Bloggers aren’t typically rolling in the dough, as you might imagine. And not to mention that owning a Mac means putting up over $150 more for Dragon, which is actually named Dictate on the Mac platform, than for the standard Windows version. Lucky me. And of course, considering the bad reputation that much speech-to-text software has, I worried that if I spent the $200, I would end up with a product that didn’t even work. Looking for other options, I was unable to find any speech to text software that was either free, trial, or open source. I was ready to give up.

But as it turns out, I was simply thinking in the wrong direction.

Believe it or not, there is an app for that. Nuance, Dragon’s parent company, released a free version of their popular product for the iPod and iPhone demographic. I must admit at first I was positive that it wouldn’t work. However, I have written half of this article using the app from my iPod Touch. Can you tell which one?

There are a few immediate drawbacks to the app. First, you need a mic if you own an iPod. I have a pair of $5.99 earbuds that came with a mic, and they work just fine. But from a usability standpoint, one of the problems common with the Dragon app is that with too much text the entire application stalls and sometimes quits. So you have to know your limitations. There is also no way to save text once it’s been transcribed. That means that I have to dictate small bits of information and e-mail the text to myself as quickly as possible. The result is quite a few e-mails in my inbox. But that saves a great deal of sore fingers, so I’m willing to compromise (this article had 7 separate emails).

And while the speech recognition is quite impressive for a free application, it does require quite a bit of editing after it’s been turned to text. While it does appear to learn words after correction, it’s not always accurate. To give you an idea what text might look like without being edited, here’s a section from The Hobbit, read aloud without any editing:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and in the Mideast now, nor yet a July, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on Ortanique: it was the hobbit hole, and that means comfort.

So, no. I probably won’t be using this to dictate my current novel in progress. But for blogging, emailing, and general note-taking, it definitely does the trick. It helps my hands, it lets me do what I love, and it’s entirely free. That’s the technology age for you. From beginning to end, this article took about an hour and a half to write, about a half hour more than normal. But it’s still a huge improvement over not writing at all! I’ll certainly take it. In the mean time, I can start writing again and hopefully save up for the better functioning full version.

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