swimmindustries

Brian Eno Releases Scape, a 'new form of album'

Brian Eno and his musician/programmer collaborator Peter Chilvers have released a new piece of software called Scape.

Scape is a new form of album which offers users deep access to its musical elements. These can be endlessly recombined to behave intelligently: reacting to each other, changing mood together, making new sonic spaces.

Scape builds on what the duo have done with past software projects but adds depth via rules and tools. It's more like a simpler, user friendly Noatikl. It also supplies AirPlay so you can bliss out your whole joint. Very cool.

Beyond Meat: Fake chicken so real it will freak you out.

Biz Stone:

“My first reaction was, if I was given this in a restaurant, I’d get the waiter to come over and ask if he’d accidentally given us real chicken,” says Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, who has been vegan for more than a decade. “It has a plumpness to it, what they call a ‘mouthfeel,’ like a kind of fattiness. When you eat other leading meat analogues, they’re delicious, but you kind of know they’re not real. They’re missing something that’s hard to identify. This has a very realistic, meaty, delicious quality.”

Can't wait to try this out.

Apple Removes Green Certification From Products

Apple's new process of permanently gluing the battery and display to the case of their new Retina MacBook Pro makes recycling virtually impossible and is therefore ineligible for the EPEAT certification. Rather than work around the problem they withdrew

Is this really good design in 2012? Disappointing.

The Turing Problem

Today is Alan Turing's 100th birthday. Take a minute to listen to Radiolab's excellent piece about his life. Truly a beautiful mind.

Jeff Bezos finds Apollo 11's F-1 engines

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration. A year or so ago, I started to wonder, with the right team of undersea pros, could we find and potentially recover the F-1 engines that started mankind's mission to the moon?

I'm inspired by Jeff Bezos.

Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin has a Lucille

The ‘bedrock’ of OPN’s sound comes from a Roland Juno 60 that Lopatin’s dad bought in the early eighties. 

Interview with Mike Powell of Resident Advisor:

It was my dad’s. He bought it in 1983, when I was one year old. He bought the Juno because he couldn’t afford the Yamaha DX-7, which was like the pop synth at the time. I think I can attest a lot of my happiness with my own music to the fact that I’m in a marriage with this one machine. For better or worse, I “get” it, and that closeness and history yields a lot of interesting results—but also, people get used to it and it starts sounding like OPN instead of a Juno, which I think is also kind of interesting.

The new Oneohtrix Point Never album Replica is out now. 

How Google's Self-Driving Car Works

Lots of interesting details about Google's autonomous vehicles are revealed in this talk by Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun who guides the project.

The second thing is that, before sending the self-driving car on a road test, Google engineers drive along the route one or more times to gather data about the environment. When it's the autonomous vehicle's turn to drive itself, it compares the data it is acquiring to the previously recorded data, an approach that is useful to differentiate pedestrians from stationary objects like poles and mailboxes.

People laugh then I say autonomous vehicle research might end up being Google's most important work. Keep in mind about 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year, roughly 14.5 times the number of people killed on 911. Think about how different our daily lives would be if "War on Terror" money was being spent on safer self-driving vehicles.

Tevatron Machine Will Smash Particles No More

Fermi Lab's particle accelerator, previously the largest particle accelerator in the world, was shut down today.

the Tevatron is where the top quark was discovered — confirming scientists' predictions about the fundamental nature of matter. And the technology inside this machine laid the foundation for an even bigger and more powerful particle collider that's just fired up in Europe, the Large Hadron Collider.

The Large Hadron Collider is what finally made the Tevatron obsolete.