Boing Boing: Import your old Sim Cities into Minecraft. “Got some old Sim City 2000 cities lying around? Import them to Minecraft with Mine City 2000, an astonishingly precise converter made by jgosar.”
New York Times: When Visiting Michelangelo’s David, She Brings a Duster. “Imagine a job that lets you get up close and personal — really, really up close and personal — with one of the world’s most famous statues. It is one perk of being the in-house restorer of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy, where Eleonora Pucci’s task is to regularly dust Michelangelo’s David, which she described recently as exhilarating, if somewhat nerve-racking.” The link is to a gift article; you should be able to read this without encountering a paywall.
CBS News: Minnesotans’ massive antique pump organ collection spans neighboring homes. “Ron Manzow has spent most of his life in Plainview. He taught third grade for decades before retiring. But you could say his home is still full of history lessons. Manzow has collected 75 pipe organs. His collection has gotten so big, in fact, that he bought the house next door to him for storage.”
Core 77: An Amusing Backup Camera Hack for Precision Parking. “Backup camera images typically feature red and green lines overlaid on the screen to give you a sense of the car’s boundaries: Green is a polite distance to leave between you and the car you’re parallel parking in front of, red is the closest you can get without trading paint. But this Reddit user, seeking to park right up to the wall of his garage, was unsatisfied with the lines. He worked up his own (impractical, but funny) hack for greater precision.” The thing is once he has the parking spot and background he doesn’t need the car. I think it’s great.
Laughing Squid: Artist Builds Giant Concrete Sarcophagus for a Bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos for Future Generations to Find. “Seattle artist Sunday Nobody built a giant concrete 3,000 pound sarcophagus for a single bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos that future generations can dig up and look back on to see what kind of junk food was popular in our time. He also added a shiny plaque on top with the ingredients of the popular snack food.”
Brandeis NOW: The age of invention: patents show differences between younger and older inventors. “The study… examined more than 3 million U.S. patents filed from 1976 to 2000 to identify certain attributes, and then analyzed them based on the age of the filers. The research found older inventors are more likely to rely on their knowledge and experience, and build on novel applications of past inventions – what psychologists call crystallized intelligence – to develop a patent. Younger inventors are more likely to submit patents that are forward-looking and rely on abstract reasoning and novel problem-solving – all traits of fluid intelligence.”
CNN Travel: Explorers find cameras left on a glacier 85 years ago. “In June 1937, Washburn and his climbing partner Robert Bates set off on a mission to climb Mount Lucania — Canada’s third highest mountain at 17,147 feet, and at that time the last unclimbed peak in North America. It is part of the Kluane National Park and Reserve on the Traditional Territory of the Kluane First Nation. They were due to start and end their climb at the Walsh Glacier, halfway up at 8,750 feet, but it wasn’t to be.”
Cornell Chronicle: SkinKit offers versatile, wearable on-skin computing. “On-skin interfaces – sometimes known as ‘smart tattoos’ – have the potential to outperform the sensing capabilities of current wearable technologies, but combining comfort and durability has proven challenging. Now, members of Cornell’s Hybrid Body Lab have come up with a reliable, skin-tight interface that’s easy to attach and detach, and can be used for a variety of purposes – from health monitoring to fashion.”
New York Times: When Technology Makes Music More Accessible. “In Britain and Ireland, a series of recent projects show the rich possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are considered in the creative process.”
Boing Boing: This guy cobbled together off-the-shelf AI tools to make an impressive digital assistant . “Consumer-grade AI has gotten a lot better and a lot cheaper. Here, a guy used UnrealEngine’s Metahuman, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s Whisper and GPT3 to make a digital assistant that understands what he says and creates art on command.”
University of Washington: How low-cost earbuds can make newborn hearing screening accessible. “Newborns across the United States are screened to check for hearing loss. This test is important because it helps families better understand their child’s health, but it’s often not accessible to children in other countries because the screening device is expensive. A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has created a new hearing screening system that uses a smartphone and low-cost earbuds instead.”
Caltech: Caltech Mathematicians Solve 19th Century Number Riddle. “For the past 175 years, a perplexing feature of numbers first stumbled upon by German mathematician Ernst Kummer has confounded researchers. At one point in the 1950s, this quirky feature of number theory was thought to have been wrong, but then, decades later, mathematicians found hints that it was in fact true. Now, after several twists and turns, two Caltech mathematicians have at last found proof that Kummer was right all along.”
Hackaday: A Collection Of Websites That Look Like Desktops. “Web design has come a long way since those halcyon days of Web 1.0. There are plenty of rules about how to make a clean and efficient website, but sometimes it’s more fun to throw them out and just be creative instead. In that vein, [Simone] has curated a wonderful collection of websites that emulate the computer desktop experience online.”
Purdue University: Developing game-based tech to detect and intervene against stress and anxiety. “A high-tech startup that uses game-based interventions to help users identify stress- and anxiety-related events in real time and receive a personalized intervention has been awarded a federal grant to partially develop its technology through research at Purdue University’s College of Engineering.”
Ars Technica: Slow Roads offers a chill, endless driving experience in your browser. “A few days ago, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based developer named Anslo announced Slow Roads, a free, easygoing driving game with procedurally generated scenic landscapes that runs in a web browser.” I’m terrible at driving games except for Super Tux Kart, but I discovered to my delight that there’s an auto-driving mode for Slow Roads. It’s nicely relaxing to spend a few minutes watching a car zooming through a generated landscape.
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