Sunday, September 15, 2013
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Best Inventions of the Year 2012
Robots, rovers and the rest of 2012's most important innovations, from the affordable to the extreme
- That’s not Photoshop. The Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde has developed a way to create a small, perfect white cloud in the middle of a room. It requires meticulous planning: the temperature, humidity and lighting all have to be just so. Once everything is ready, Smilde summons the cloud out of the air using a fog machine. It lasts only moments, but the effect is dramatic and strangely moving. It evokes both the surrealism of Magritte and the classical beauty of the old masters while reminding us of the ephemerality of art and nature
We, the Domesticated Cyborg
Tim Maly, over at Quiet Babylon, is celebrating 50th anniversary of the concept of the cyborg (first coined in 1960) by soliciting brief essays from a bunch of writers. I contributed a very short essay that is adapted from a section of my new book. A snippet of the piece he is running as the first of50 posts about cyborgs.
Double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius at the start of the men's 400 meters race at the Track and Field Golden Gala in 2008.
The deep union of ourselves with our inventions is not new. If a cyborg means a being that is part biological and part technological then we humans began as cyborgs, and still are. Our ancestors first chipped stone scrapers 2.5 million years ago to give themselves claws. By about 250,000 years ago they devised crude techniques for cooking, or pre-digesting, with fire. Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this artificial organ it permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us.
We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have co-evolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. As we domesticated the dog (in all its breeds) from wolves and bred cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors, we, too, have been domesticated....
Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented. We have used our minds to manufacture our selves and thus we humans today are the first cyborgs. We have invented ourselves. And we are not done yet.
Galaxy Gear: Samsung unveils new smartwatch
Smartphones, with their big screens and accurate clocks, have been blamed for the failing sales of wristwatches. But on Wednesday in Berlin, Samsung announced a gadget that, it hopes, will soon be decking those currently empty wrists - a smart watch.
Modern, appealing wearable tech took a step closer to reality when Samsung announced the Galaxy Gear. And the Korean manufacturer will hope it is paving the way for a whole new category of gadget with this invention.
Nobody puts on a show quite like Samsung. A hidden orchestra played highly effective background music, giant screens showed images of new products and, suddenly, black cloths fell away to double the screen size. JK Shin, Samsung's president and CEO, revealed this highly secret product in the most sideways of fashions: when talking about another phone, the screen showed an image of the smart watch as if by accident, proving it can put text message alerts and reminders on your wrist.
So far, the buzzphrase of wearable tech has been mostly limited to gadgets that are not on widespread sale, like the Google Glass headset that is turning out to be the most Marmitey of gizmos, inspiring strong reactions even from people who have never even seen one. Or the Apple iWatch which remains nothing more than rumour at present.
Smart watches could be a more palatable bit of kit than a glasses headset. There are already smart wrist bands like the Nike+ FuelBand which monitors your every step to encourage you to get fitter, but the new breed of smart watch will do much more and will work in conjunction with your smartphone or tablet.
Since big-screen phones like the Sony Xperia Z Ultra with its gigantic 6.4 inch display can be unwieldy, a smart watch will let you see who is calling without retrieving the glass slab from your bag. In fact, Sony is already working on this and releases its second smart watch this month after the first one failed to take off. Samsung will hope for better sales with its model.
The Galaxy Gear is a watch with a 1.63-inch bright touchscreen display and slick stainless steel frame. It allows you to make and receive calls (think Dick Tracy but with a brighter watch strap – actually there are six straps to choose from). Other smart watches do not do this and Samsung sees it as a real game changer. Whether anyone really wants to make a phone call by shouting into their wrist without donning a trenchcoat and trilby is uncertain.
With the Gear, the speaker and microphone are embedded in the strap so you hold your hand to your ear to make calls – though Samsung says you can move your hand wherever you like during a call.
The Gear cannot do any of this unless you have a Samsung smartphone that links it to the mobile phone network. When it is connected it can show incoming texts and messages, or remind you of upcoming appointments. It also uses S Voice – Samsung’s voice-control app similar to Apple’s Siri – so you can set an alarm, check the weather and more using voice commands.
A camera in the strap will take a photo when you swipe the screen. And the Gear has apps which add extra functionality to make sharing photos and messages easier still. A motion sensor means you can use it as a pedometer to monitor your activity. Samsung says it will change how we interact with each other.
There is no doubt that Samsung is now one of the most innovative and influential companies in the world, in any field, showing that it can execute advanced products faster than rivals and at lower prices.
Samsung has done what Apple likes to do: taken a barely established product category and made it approachable, attractive and even desirable. But how many people really want the innovations it so effortlessly delivers remains to be seen.
Sony New Invention
Sony has been coming up with new invention idea.. This company try to invent new laptop like above....
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Hallgrimskirkja
Hallgrimskirkja Lutheran Church in Reykjavik, is the fourth tallest building in Iceland. The project was developed by the parish church in 1937 by architect Gudi Nom Samuelson. For the construction of the church they took 38 years. The church is located in the center of Reykjavik, and it’s visible to see from any part of the city. It became one of the main attractions of the city, and is also used as a survey platform
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