next up, full brain interface

Here we see Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of the MIT Media Lab present their Sixth Sense user interface at the TED Conference here in Long Beach last year.

To break it down quick - it's a mobile interface that uses a cellphone, a camera and a projector to turn any surface into something that can interact with a networked device.

Think about that for a moment.

While this made the rounds last year, I have yet to hear anyone talking about how the future of mobile applications belongs to who really who nails the interface. Technology doesn't mean squat unless you can use it with an almost childish simplicity. Check out a case study of the light switch for greater detail.

If Sixth Sense gets to that point, I think even the touchscreen gets tossed.

Apologies, Mr. Jobs.

beauty is the flavor of quark

When I’m looking for a culture arbiter, it’s typically not science that springs to mind. However, after digital media took over my old print world, I've been paying attention to technology. Stuff like this next article.

Writing in the January edition of Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen writes about the Large Hadron Collider currently beginning testing and research at C.E.R.N. on the Swiss-France border.

Basically the Large Hadron Collider (L.H.C.) is a giant particle accelerator and the largest single machine constructed in human history. But despite the huge scientific gains presented by the project, Andersen presents the research as only the beginning of learning about the universe:

One of the paradoxes of physics is that as knowledge has dramatically grown—thanks to particle physicists [continued research in particle accelerators], and to astrophysicists measuring the distances and movements and energies of stars—so has our awareness of the vastness of our ignorance.

The funniest part comes later in the article, when after hearing a lecture by Stephen Hawking and not understanding about 80 percent of it, Andersen quickly figures out that the limited knowledge of these physicists is pretty substantial:

I realized that the physicists with whom I’d been speaking all week had been radically dumbing down their explanations so that I, a functional fifth-grader, might achieve some tiny glimmer of understanding.

Even with only a model covering four percent of an understanding on how our physical universe behaves, the L.H.C. – at a cost of $9 billion and employing half the particle physicists in the world – could provide insight unheard of previous to its discoveries.

Or it could be a giant art project.

But would that be so bad?

“We have dreams,” L.H.C. physicist Fabiola Gianotti says.

“It’s like art. Is art useless? Yes and no. The concepts [of particle physics] are so beautiful in their simplicity. And they answer the most fundamental questions. Physics and art are two forms of the same wish of human intuition, to understand nature.”