All posts by Jeremy Eades

I'm an English teacher in Japan. I have an interest in the brain and language acquisition, not to mention writing and the pipedream that I'll become the next Asimov. Or something like that. Nice to meet you!
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What can your ink-jet do?

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253958853_dea8d75cb0_m And here I thought Xerox was for copying body parts at the office Xmas party.  Turns out, printing technology is very flexible and researchers are trying to adapt it to various applications such as water purification machines and printing solar panels.

There’s also a bit of history on PARC (Palo Alto Research Center):

PARC is one of the older–and more productive–industrial incubators. Xerox founded it in 1970, and 30 companies have been spun out of it. Inventions from the lab include the mouse, Ethernet, the Alto (the archetype of the PC), the laser printer, and, ignominiously, the computer worm. It was also one of the first industrial organizations to employ anthropologists and ethnographers. Xerox wanted to know how people actually interacted with copiers (besides hitting them and swearing at them).

I didn’t know private industry did this, perhaps these centers operate in the background and we just don’t hear about them very often.

(via DailyTech) (image via Zixii)

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Moving the Earth

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450825428_b0ef55b12e_m_d The typical ending of our lovely planet will come in several billion years when the Sun swells up and engulfs all of the inner planets.  But it’s never too early to start thinking of how to rescue our beloved cradle.

According to an article in the NYTimes, the Earth faces an unknown future because it will move further out in orbit as the Sun expends its mass and the gravitational forces become weaker.

One solution is to lasso comets and asteroids, swinging them near the Earth and using their slight gravity to boost the Earth to a higher orbit, where it could escape the Sun’s expansion.  Because, y’know, what could go wrong with that?

(image from NASA website)

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Skysail – a retrospective

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MS_Beluga_SkySails_gesetzter_Kite Sails on boats?  Using wind to move ships?  My God, what will they think of next!?

Our own Tomas Martin brought up this novel concept back in January.  Now that the Beluga has completed the first leg of its voyage and the costs have been calculated, it turns out that the savings estimates of 20%/day (roughly $1500, or 3 euros and a handful of beans on the exchange market) were spot on.  To put it in perspective, the normal fuel budget is around $7500/day.  That’s a big chunk of change, and a boon to an industry that has been found to be even more damaging in terms of carbon emissions.

(via Dailytech, image from Skysails website)

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‘Roadside Picnic’ in game form

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Man, I love post-apocalyptic tales.  Seeing the breakdown of social order and its ramifications – and then watching ordinary people struggle to put some semblence of order back into their lives – really entertains me.  And the video game industry’s full of this stuff.  One game that came out last year, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Shadow of Cherynobyl, injected some good ‘ol Soviet pessimism into the mix to bring one of the best – albeit buggy – games of 2007.  And considering that other game, that’s saying quite a bit.  The bugginess is excusable simply due to the raw ambition of the AI (actually called A-Life) involved in the game. 

The developers at GSC Gameworld attempted to create a living world for you to follow the story in – a ballet of mutant pigs, blind dogs, and desperate humans through which the player stumble through following his own path.  Sure, it broke a lot.  I’d often turn up to meet somebody, only to find them shredded by wild dogs and the quest unrealizable.  But, while the story you take part in is good, watching the others around you go about their business is just as great, if not more.  And the best part?  Clear Sky, a kind of prequel, is slated to come out in May 2008.  It’s more of a v1.5 on the original tech-wise.  Clear Sky covers what happens immediately after something else goes wrong at  Chernobyl, while the original (I can’t be asked to type all those full-stops) is set more than a decade past.

For a rather technical discussion of the A-Life system, read this interview.  If you want to read more about the original, including how the developers’ office is an abandoned military factory in Ukraine, RPS has a good interview up.  And if you haven’t read the original “Roadside Picnic,” go here now.

(via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)(image from S.T.A.L.K.E.R official site)