Image by woody1778a via Flickr

Nice.

ghet·to (gt)

n. pl. ghet·tos or ghet·toes

1. A usually poor section of a city inhabited primarily by people of the same race, religion, or social background, often because of discrimination.

2. An often walled quarter in a European city to which Jews were restricted beginning in the Middle Ages.

3. Something that resembles the restriction or isolation of a city ghetto: "trapped in ethnic or pink-collar managerial job ghettoes" (Diane Weathers).

The Eyez project is developing a pair of stylish specs with a hidden 720p video camera, mic and 8GB of memory.  But wait, that’s not all!  These badboys are also Bluetooth-enabled so, when coupled with a mobile phone, can stream live video out to the web.  Take that dirty cops!

Our engineering team at ZionEyez is currently developing Eyez, the latest innovation in personal video recording technology. Eyez embeds a 720p HD video camera within a pair of eyeglasses designed to record live video data. The recorded data can be stored on the 8GB of flash memory within the Eyez glasses, transferred via Bluetooth or Micro USB to a computer, or wirelessly transferred to most iPhone or Android devices. After a one-time download of the "Eyez" smartphone and tablet app, users can wirelessly broadcast the video in real time to their preferred social networking website.

I normally post shorts of the more artistic variety, but am making an exception for this nine-minute tribute to Carl Sagan produced by callumCGLP for Milky Way Musings.  Narrated by Sagan himself, the clip features excerpts from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. 

Sagan was a true gem – a man of vast intelligence tempered by an unsurpassed wonderment of both the art and mystery of life, he effortlessly traverses and unifies the topologies of science, philosophy and religion while remaining both captivating and entertaining.  In nine short minutes, he manages to illustrate our overwhelming insignificance while conversely asserting a nearly limitless power to expand our destiny.  The first of a series of 13 (so far), the video is set against an engaging visual foreground from Discovery's Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking and the BBC's Wonders of the Solar System with Brian Cox alongside a musical score from the Lost Soundtrack (yup, you heard me) and is sure to both entertain and illuminate your week.  Enjoy!

Image via Wikipedia

Researchers in Australia – where everyone knows the robocalypse will begin – are helping robots to invent their own language. 

To understand the concept behind the project, consider a simplified case of how language might have developed. Let's say that all of a sudden you wake up somewhere with your memory completely wiped, not knowing English, Klingon, or any other language. And then you meet some other person who's in the exact same situation as you. What do you do?

What might very well end up happening is that you invent some random word to describe where you are right now, and then point at the ground and tell the word to the other person, establishing a connection between this new word and a place. And this is exactly what the Lingodroids do. If one of the robots finds itself in an unfamiliar area, it'll make up a word to describe it, choosing a random combination from a set of syllables. It then communicates that word to other robots that it meets, thereby defining the name of a place.

First of all, I don’t care how big a bump on the head I received, I would never, NEVER forget how to speak Klingon.  That said, while I agree the project is fairly interesting, I have to wonder about the merit of these kinds of experiments that pre-suppose the outcome – in other words, the process relies on the very assumptions of how languages develop that it purports to address.

Either way, when I’m in a badass swordfight with our robotic overlords, I want to be able to understand the smack talk!

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