The Cell

The Cell...

All the buzz...

TOKYO — IBM, Sony and Toshiba on Monday announced the first technical details of the widely-anticipated "Cell" processor, also known as a "supercomputer on a chip," with Power architecture at its heart...

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The Designibles

Also via Tom Coates, a link to this Design Observer post on The Incredibles.

Spontaneous Order?

Via plasticbag, check out Pixelfest, a collaborative work of art.

Non-Photorealistic Rendering

There's a nice collection of NPR stuff here.

The Taste of Synaesthesia

Man, I don't know what's gotten into me in the past 24 hours. I'm feeling as blogarrulous as PZ Meyers.

The thought of tetrachromats reminded me of another fascinating perceptual anomoly called synaesthesia, a condition in which senses intermingle and sounds elicit tastes. Here's a Telegraph article on synaesthesia.

Hitting the Spot

Scott Drave's "Spot Blog" has interesting graphical curiosities. He notes that his "Spot" is the 55th ranked spot in Google. I wonder if this Spot link will change that in any way. :-)

Also, via the Spot Blog, check out Bathsheba Grossman for some interesting sculpted geometry.

How Do You Count Bits?

How do you count bits?

It's said to be a job interview question, but I've never encountered it. The thing is, after reading a lot of code over the years, I'm surprised by how frequently loops are used by engineers, even in code where speed is critical.

Here's a page that does a good job with the subject:
Counting the Number of Bits in an Integer.

Are We All Colorblind?

Since I'm on the subject, if you never read this old article (Looking for Madam Tetrachromat) in Red Herring (12/4/2000), it's an interesting read. In the absence of a Red Herring login, this Google search will find you a copy.

"Oh, everyone knows my color vision is different," chuckles Mrs. M, a 57-year-old English social worker. "People will think things match, but I can see they don't." What you wouldn't give to see the world through her deep blue-gray eyes, if only for five minutes.
Preliminary evidence gathered at Cambridge University in 1993 suggests that this woman is a tetrachromat, perhaps the most remarkable human mutant ever identified. Most of us have color vision based on three channels; a tetrachromat has four.

The theoretical possibility of this secret sorority -- genetics dictates that tetrachromats would all be female -- has intrigued scientists since it was broached in 1948. Now two scientists, working separately, plan to search systematically for tetrachromats to determine once and for all whether they exist and whether they see more colors than the rest of us do. The scientists are building on a raft of recent findings about the biology of color vision...

The Mysteries of Color

Trying to grok as much color science as possible, I was reading about metamerism when I tried to come up with a name for this blog. Hence, the name. Danny Pascale of BabelColor.com has been doing a nice introductory series at Graphics.com titled The RGB Code: The Mysteries of Color Revealed.

Compgeom Blog

A group of computational geometers have created Compgeom Blog.

Film vs Digital?

Norman Koren's tutorial page has a lot of useful information regarding film cameras vs. digital cameras, down to the level of modulation transfer function.

Rambling...

Separating the wheat from the chaff{g}, remaining members of Nullsoft leave AOL.

Kudos to Suresh from Geomblog for all his cartogram work after the election.

If you want to see my Flickr photos, here you go.

Two thumbs up for The Incredibles

The Check's in the Mail

I haven't read anything more than the introduction of this paper...

"We develop an empirical procedure to quantify future company performance based on top management promises. We find that the number of future tense occurrences in 10-K reports is significantly negatively correlated with the return as well as with the excess return on the company stock price."

link: http://arxiv.org/ftp/math/papers/0410/0410586.pdf

Plummeting LCD TV Prices

Man, who hasn't been waiting to see this headline...

Via PCWorld, Price Check: LCD TVs See Big Cuts