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Shortly before his retirement at 60, Tatsuo Horiuchi picked up a copy of Microsoft Excel and started making art with it. His art does not look anything like you'd expect Excel art to look:

Tags: art   Excel   Tatsuo Horiuchi

To help thwart rampant insurance fraud in Russia many cars are now equipped with dash cams to capture what unfolds in front of vehicles in an attempt to aid innocent persons, law enforcement, and insurance firms. This has lead to almost unlimited hours of footage found online of unbelievable accidents, close calls, and some of the worst of human behavior. Luckily somebody took it upon themselves to edit together some of the most amazingly thoughtful actions and tender moments caught with these same dash cams and edited into this short clip. And can I just say what on Earth is up with that kid running around on the highway!? (via kottke)

Images courtesy of the artist

We were duly impressed with David Soukup's painstakingly detailed stencils when we first saw them back in 2011—I could hardly believe that some of those ultrafine lines were stenciled and not applied by an implement (or at least masked off). He's pleased to announce a solo show at Maxwell Colette gallery in his current hometown of Chicago: "This show is one of my most personal to date, and marks a return to some of the imagery and technical precision that I became known for."

I hadn't realized that he lost his way (the mural project, pictured above, dates to October of last year), but earlier this year, Soukup wrote that "I had been cutting stencils for so long that I really lost what made them most important to me, and why I started doing them in the first place."

In any case, we're glad he's back on track with his first exhibition in 16 months, featuring "over 20 pieces of new work (both stencils and screenprints)." The title, Perennial Escapism, is an obvious play on the subject matter, but the rather literal take on an exit strategy belies the integrity of the subject matter: the imagery is "derived from the artist's own photographs of early 20th century wrought iron fire escapes in Chicago." To hear Soukup tell it:

This work represents a personal 'escape' so to speak. I went back to what first made me passionate. I drew inspiration not just from the city imagery itself, but from the textures, the grit, and the distress that makes up a city. Perennial Escapism marks the beginning of a new direction, one I've never been more excited to pursue.

Where his previous work was more collage-y and surreal, the stark new compositions evoke film stills, superimposed on a baselayer of impasto on the wood panels to achieve the effect of a vaguely patina'd or otherwise weathered surface. Per the press release:

Soukup's paintings combine visual elements of graphic design and collage with the tactile elements of paint and reclaimed materials to create decidedly urban motifs. He hand-cuts the elaborate stencils, some up to four feet in length, that are utilized to create his paintings. The resulting latticework of iron bars and shadows echoes the visual experience of his everyday life, and reflects his obsession with meticulous detail.

We're pleased to present an exclusive preview of Perennial Escapism:

(more...)

Thearn released a free/open program for detecting and monitoring your pulse using your webcam. The code is on github for you to download, play with and modify. If this stuff takes your fancy, be sure and read Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World, an inspiring paper describing the techniques Thearn uses in his code:

This application uses openCV (http://opencv.org/) to find the location of the user's face, then isolate the forehead region. Data is collected from this location over time to estimate the user's heartbeat frequency. This is done by measuring average optical intensity in the forehead location, in the subimage's green channel alone. Physiological data can be estimated this way thanks to the optical absorbtion characteristics of oxygenated hemoglobin.

With good lighting and minimal noise due to motion, a stable heartbeat should be isolated in about 15 seconds. Other physiological waveforms, such as Mayer waves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayer_waves), should also be visible in the raw data stream.

Once the user's pulse signal has been isolated, temporal phase variation associated with the detected hearbeat frequency is also computed. This allows for the heartbeat frequency to be exaggerated in the post-process frame rendering; causing the highlighted forhead location to pulse in sync with the user's own heartbeat (in real time).

Support for pulse-detection on multiple simultaneous people in an camera's image stream is definitely possible, but at the moment only the information from one face is extracted for cardiac analysis

thearn / webcam-pulse-detector (via O'Reilly Radar)

For hand towels, astronauts get those little vacuum-packed pucks that you kind of have to unravel into a towel. But what happens when you actually put the towels to use?

Two Nova Scotia high school students, Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner, submitted this experiment to Canadian Space Agency and got to see astronaut Chris Hadfield actually test it out on the ISS. The results are seriously extraordinary and you need to see them.

Thanks, Dean!

Paul sez, "This past semester, three engineering grad students at the University of Toronto (myself and two others) created an Android app for a course project that allows for wireless and intuitive control of a robotic arm from an Android-powered smartphone. We're pretty proud of the results (the link is to a demo we put together) and have released the code open source."

Android Robotic Manipulator Demo (Thanks, Paul!)

A DVD drive could be the next revolution in blood analysis, according to a team of researchers who have turned the mundane object into a laser scanning microscope, reports PhysOrg. The "Lab on a DVD" technology repurposes the laser, normally used to scan physical media like CDs and DVDs, into a cost effective and efficient cellular imaging tool. The research team reports that this tool can complete an HIV blood test analysis in only a few minutes, whereas laboratory results from blood tests today can take several days. Such blood analysis testing is traditionally performed on machines that cost around $30,000, but the team's DVD analysis tool could be produced for less than $200.

The major modifications needed to transform a commercial...

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Imagine the kind of havoc a malicious hacker could cause if he or she were able to take over an airplane simply using his Android phone. With a tap of his or her fingers, the hacker could arbitrarily control the plane remotely and redirect its path. If you think this is only something that could happen in a Hollywood movie, think again, because that's exactly the scenario a German security researcher laid out on Wednesday at a conference in Amsterdam.

Hugo Teso, a security researcher for the German IT consultancy firm N.Runs — he is a trained commercial pilot as well — explained at the Hack in the Box security conference that a protocol used to transmit data to commercial airplanes can be hacked, turning the hacker into a full-fledged hijacker Read more...

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If the bird is the word, three must be the number.

I have a healthy (until proven otherwise) obsession with the number three. It guides my thought about practically everything and anything, but it’s also present on so many things in life.

Most great stories have three acts. The three pyramids of Giza. Past, present and future. Three great Star Wars movies. Exactly.

I also love reading. I’d say at least 50% of my leisure time is spent with the written word (on paper or digital format). But since there are always more books and articles than time to read them, and in order to avoid the stress of knowing we’re always going to miss something, recently I started guiding my reading habits according to three (yep) simple rules:

• 30 pages is enough. Not enough to grasp the key message, but enough to understand if it’s worth grasping. If by page 30 of a book I’m not hooked, I stop reading. A writer has to hook our imaginations, and 30 pages should be enough to do just that. Need more pages? I say need more editing.
• Love or leave. This one is a semi-corollary of the first rule, but powerful enough to stand on its own. Basically, if I don’t instantly fall in love with an article/book/blog, I stop reading and move on. In a time of infinite resources but finite attention, first impressions matter more than ever.
• Respect the attic. What helps my system complete full circle. Sherlock Holmes famously considered our brains to be like a little empty attic, which we stock with objects of our choosing. Since attention is finite, I don’t want to decorate my attic with stuff that doesn’t make me dream. This isn’t the same as only reading about stuff directly related to work; it’s about transversely choosing which different types of information will make my attic sustainable and unique.

A short bonus regarding long reads: in case of doubt, skip to the conclusion. If it’s worthy of understanding how the author got there, read it all. If not, congratulations. You just avoided wasting time. (I owe this one to Jason Fried)

I have found this system to be incredibly relaxing, because I spend less time reading things which I don’t really enjoy, and therefore have more time to read what matters to me (and also more time to go outside and experiment with photography, a recent new passion). Having cut my RSS feeds to 9 (3 x 3) essential references helps too.

All the information we have available only increases our stress levels and diminishes available time. We consume much more than we create, we read much more than we think, and it should be the other way around. We have to make sure we consume the things that truly matter to us, but only so that we have time to create something that matters to someone else.

Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too short for bad information.

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Raspberry Pi, the tiny, cheap and hackable computer for children of all ages, may be used as the heart of an Ambilight media center, a cat feeder, a Minecraft or MAME console, to pwn your foes' websites and serve torrents, or as the brains of a supercomputer cluster. Me, I've been recreating the magic of failing to learn to program in the 1980s, when every home computer challenged you with a code interpreter the moment you turned it on. You can make it pretty with a custom case, and check out a zillion other great Pideas at Pingbin, Ars Technica and the official homepage. (Previously)

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Honey doesn’t just make tea better, it also helps you save money on shopping.

Honey is a Chrome extension that surfs the web for discounts when you are checking out of an online store. Today, the startup announced it has closed a seed round of an undisclosed six-figure amount from angel investors.

In the days of yore, budget-conscious shoppers would go through newspapers to clip coupons before taking a trip to the store. People are buying online now more than ever; however, Hudson said this shift is both “a blessing and a curse” for consumers, as “the convenience of online shopping is accompanied by the paradox of choice.” The Internet has hundreds of thousands of merchants selling an endless array of products. Prices fluctuate, and there is always the lingering fear, once you hit checkout, that you could have held out for a better deal.

Honey’s mission is to eliminate this fear by helping you find the best deal on a product you have selected.

“Honey was created to solve a problem that we have all been dealing with for the past 10-15 years,” said founder Ryan Hudson in an email. “Honey is unique because of its design philosophy — the product was designed to add value when users need it most. We loved the idea of creating a shopping companion that helped you only when you needed it, which is very different than most plug-ins, which are often ever-present.”

Most e-checkouts ask users if they have a promo code. More often than not, the answer is no. Honey places a “Find Savings” button on the checkout page of hundreds of online shops. Clicking on the button will automatically find and apply coupons, without redirecting you away from the original site. It is coupon clipping for the Internet era.

Hudson earned his MBA from MIT and formerly worked as a venture capitalist. His cofounder, George Ruan, has worked for five startups, three which had exits. They “accidentally” launched Honey around Thanksgiving, after someone they hired to help bug test the technology posted it on Reddit. Honey now has over 200,000 users and works with over 100 sites, including big brands like Amazon.com, BestBuy, Macy’s, Lowes, Target, and Walgreens.

Honey is by no means the only coupon clipping tool out there. Google recently announced Zavers, a digital coupon based on your phone number,  as well as Coupons at Checkout, which works in multiple browsers and 100,000 online retailers, and there are others like RetailMeNot, Coupon Tweet, Coupon Gravy, and KT Coupon that offer some variation on the same principal. With so much saturation, Honey has a battle ahead of it to catch customers, retail partners, and investors.

Honey is based in Pasadena, California and has 10 employees, including an engineering team with experience working at Apple and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Coupons are almost as cool as rockets. Almost.

Photo Credit: Honey

Filed under: Business, Deals, Entrepreneur, Search

The folks over at Teehan+Lax have just released a new tool (you’ll need Google Chrome and a pretty kickin’ internet connection) that lets you scrape public data from Google Street View to create sweeping hyperlapse videos. What’s a hyperlapse? Via Teehan+Lax:

Hyper-lapse photography—a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest—has been a growing trend on video sites. It’s not hard to find stunning examples on Vimeo. Creating them requires precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material. It worked so well, we decided to design a very usable UI around our engine and release Google Street View Hyperlapse.

The team turned their new UI over to one of their motion designers, Jonas, who made the stunning clip above. Incredible. Some other great examples of art made with Google Street View: Address is Approximate and this clip from Giacomo Miceli. (via it’s nice that)

FLUIDIC is the result of a unique collaboration between Hyundai’s Advanced Design Center and Berlin-based studio WHITEvoid. The interactive light sculpture is made from 12,000 suspended spheres that act as three dimensional pixels, or voxels. Surrounded by 3D cameras the piece can sense viewer’s motions which are then translated into light patterns, but amazingly the light supplied to the individual voxels is fully external. An array of high-speed lasers project into the cloud to create the dynamic visuals in real-time. Via WHITEvoid:

A seemingly floating point cloud above a water pond and consisting of 12,000 translucent spheres marks the heart of the installation. Due to a complex computer algorithm the spheres are arranged seemingly random within the cloud. At the same time the algorithm observes the positions and projection angles of eight high-speed laser projectors that are being arranged around the artwork. They are sending out beams scanning through the arrangement of the cloud. Generating bright and dim light points, this creates a highly organic and natural distribution of voxels (3D pixels). Emerging lines and shapes finally form graphical compositions without any sweet or blind spots. Keeping the same density and intensity the FLUIDIC graphics enables their viewers to observe and interact with it from every point of view.

FLUIDIC will be on display at the Temporary Museum for New Design in Milan through April 14th.

If you liked this project, there are several other artists working with interactive light fields lately, many of which have appeared here on Colossal including the flexible Firewall, the Water Light Graffiti system and also Submergence.

Fifty years ago in 1963, Ivan Sutherland first demonstrated Sketchpad, one of the most important contributions to the field of Computer Science. Long before Apple, the Lisa and Xerox's Alto, a constraint-based object-oriented graphical system was developed and demonstrated.

Today's video was pointed out by Charles Choi over on his Notes from /dev/null blog. He writes, "Sometimes you're told something that happened some time ago. You stash that date in the back of your mind only to recall it much later in life, surprised and chagrined at the time that's passed since you last thought of it... Today I recalled Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, arguably the most significant Computer Science Ph.D. thesis ever. I had the fortune in the mid-'90s to watch a rare videocassette recording of Alan Kay describing Sketchpad for a computer graphics course taught by Randy Pausch. Fast-forward to today and the video is only a YouTube search away."

Looking at that video, it's just amazing to think of that kind of tech in 1963.

Blast from the GUI past: 50 years after Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad first debuted originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remembering the passwords for all your sites can get frustrating. There are only so many punctuation, number substitutes and uppercase variations you can recall, and writing them down for all to find is hardly an option

Thanks to researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Information, you may not need to type those pesky passwords in the future. Instead, you'll only need to think them.

By measuring brainwaves with biosensor technology, researchers are able to replace passwords with "passthoughts" for computer authentication. A $100 headset wirelessly connects to a computer via Bluetooth, and the device's sensor rests against the user’s forehead, providing a electroencephalogram (EEG) signal from the brain Read more...

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Whether you're writing a story, making crafts or coming up with a new business venture, a good idea can be hard to find. But with a little ambition, a dash of determination and a pinch of creativity, you'll be well on your way.

SEE ALSO: More Comics on Mashable

In this comic, Grant Snider of Incidental Comics shows us that there's only one way to find out if an idea is good or bad — chase it. When do you get your best ideas?

Snider's comics are available as prints through his poster shop.

Comic illustration by Grant Snider, Incidental Comics. Published with permission; all rights reserved. Read more...

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As any woman can tell you, shopping for designer denim is a miserable affair. Sizing has long been inconsistent across brands — an Ann Taylor "6" might be a Diane von Furstenberg "10," for example — but in the jeans department, where there is a need for a more precise fit, the inconsistencies are particularly aggravating.

Enter Me-Ality, a self-billed "digital sizing station" recently installed in six Bloomingdales locations: the 59th Street flagship in Manhattan, Roosevelt Field Mall (N.Y.), Chevy Chase (Md.), Santa Monica Place (Calif.) and South Coast Plaza (Calif.). The stations take 10- to 15-second body scans of shoppers, matching their measurements against those of in-store and online merchandise to recommend brands, styles and sizes likely to fit and flatter them best. Read more...

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