Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
There’s a whole lot of fun in this project by Pablo Fernandez Eyre: famous movie posters turn into moving pictures with the help of the actual scene from the movie itself. It’s like if the movie posters were GIFs, you get to see what led up to and what happened after the scene they took…
“Starvation is a crazy thing.” Earlier this year, Tommy Caldwell completed the first-ever free climb of the Dawn Wall at El Capitan. But he’d never have gotten there if he hadn’t been taken hostage by rebels in Kyrgyzstan. Here’s his story. Did we mention that this is the guy who accidentally cut his left index…
Ever wondered how your own selfies compare against the internet’s vast amount of artistically crafted narcissism-laden self portraits? Turns out, there’s an AI for that. Feeding two million internet selfies into a “140-million-parameter state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network,” a Standford PhD candidate has trained an AI to classify “good” selfies from “bad” ones. Convolutional Neural Networks,…
It’s happened. At last. Halloween is on a Saturday. So once you’re done with the 12-hour trick-or-treating marathon, take a photo! The Challenge Take a photograph of a jack-o-lantern, Halloween costume, or a giant pile of candy. Whatever you like! Just take a photograph of Halloween. The Method Given the variety of your potential subjects,…
Taking your bike out for a spin on days when the roads are a little wet is a risky venture. But when winter’s icy glaze finally covers the land, your riding days are over. Or are they? Not when your bike has its own ice skates. Developed in Buffalo, New York, home of some of…
Nepal is home to the best climbing, trekking and mountaineering on earth. But, earlier this year, it also had a massive earthquake, an avalanche on Everest and is right now subject to a “blockade” by its neighbor India. Can you still visit? Surprisingly, now may be the best time ever. An avalanche on Everest killed…
Hey, you, what’s your favorite fish? Oh, salmon, that’s cool. Except that “salmon” may not have been what you think it was at all. So what was it? A new study put out by Oceana deals exactly with that question, and finds that at least 43 percent of the time, the label on your salmon…
Money. Cars. Sex. Accomplishment. Things. They all make us happy. But drugs and alcohol and addiction all feed the dopamine meter too. So what truly makes us happy? Panoply made this animation detailing a guide to happiness and it’s a fun watch, just to see the cool animation. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us…
A military blimp that’s part of the military’s Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Netted Sensor System (JLENS) broke free of its tethers in Maryland today, and was last spotted crossing into Pennsylvania. So keep your eyes peeled! The rogue blimp, or aerostat, is part of an aerial detection system meant to be on the…
YouTube Red, the semi-controversial ad-free video service, is now open for business. Sign up for a free one-month trial here, but don’t expect to find any videos from ESPN. Contact the author at [email protected]. Public PGP key PGP fingerprint: 91CF B387 7B38 148C DDD6 38D2 6CBC 1E46 1DBF 22A8
The unending march of technological progress probably left you feeling slightly confused when your fancy new 12-inch MacBook arrived with just a single USB-C port. Satechi has a solution to Apple’s oversight, though, that doesn’t compromise your new laptop’s tiny footprint. The company’s new Type-C Hub Adapter sidles up alongside your laptop and turns its…
Decrypting copyrighted materials is, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an illegal act. Yesterday, the Library of Congress issued a set of exemptions to the DMCA’s decryption ban, which many outlets, including Gizmodo, hailed as “victories” and “big wins.” They’re not. At best, the new rules allow people to do things they legally had…
Music, if it is to be perfect, can’t be perfectly timed. A perfectly timed musical composition may sound mistimed to our stupid human brains, especially if it’s synthesized. Some people have spent large parts of their childhood noting the effects of variedperceptual attack time — the lagbetween when the note begins playing and when we…
Google Play Games is the hub of all things mobile gaming on Android, keeping track of achievements or helping you find that next mobile gaming addition. Now, the app has a new tool to help you share your most epic gaming moments—with friends of your budding YouTube Gaming fan base. When opening up a game…
October 30, 1964: What’s the best way to practice lunar landings when you’ve never been to the moon? With the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, of course! Although decidedly inelegant in appearance, astronauts relied on these engineering marvels for their practice. A Lunar Landing Research Vehicle approaches maximum altitude at Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards…
Microsoft’s been upping its app game for awhile now, and the one that’s received the most attention is Outlook. Earlier this year, Microsoft redesigned Outlook to look just like Acompli, an email client it bought months earlier. Now Sunrise, a super-great calendar app recently acquired by Microsoft, will also be sacrificed for the Outlook greater…
Every week, it seems, we hear about a new way that humans are screwing up the oceans. Too much plastic. Too much sunscreen. Too much fishing. Next to these problems, “not enough whale poop” does sounds a bit silly, but I assure you, it’s a serious consequence of human exploitation. Over the last few centuries,…
There is such a thing as too much freedom. If nothing was illegal, people would rob and kill each other! There’s no such thing as too much net neutrality, however. Unless you’re talking to the billionaire son of a dentist who’s trying to make every person on the planet sign up for his internet website.…
What if we could grow electronics in a lab, using carefully engineered bacteria rather than wires, plastic, and lithium? At MIT, computer interaction researchers are doing just that. The director of MIT’s Tangible Media Group, Professor Hiroshi Ishii, describes it as a “paradigm shift from building to growing.” The group has named this idea Radical…
Here’s a fun bit: a foley artist recreating and accentuating the sounds of everyday life, transforming a shower into hand tossing spaghetti while making coffee can be blowing bubbles in a milkshake with a swirly straw. The imagination of sounds gets more and more ridiculous which results in more and more fun. Presented by Nowness…
