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"There will never be a good Game of Thrones video game." For years, those words rang just as true as the Starks' promise of winter. Finally, it feels as though that's changed.

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"Google+ has lost its way," declares former UX designer in a blog post on Medium.

Former Google+ UX designer (and hashtag inventor) Chris Messina has declared Google's social network a bust in a scathing post on Medium.

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Check out this cool geology inspired art installation. From Motherboard:

A lot of data-driven art revolves around visualizing the digital and unseen, such as works by Addie Wagenknecht and Art Hack Day’s “Afterglow” participants. But Sean Cotterill and Benjamin Freeth take a very different path in their recent work Gold Lines Are Mineral Veins: Instead of data mining an online world, their data was collected from literal mines.

The audio-visual installation was built to highlight the vast networks that humans have carved out underground; as Cotterill noted on his website, the project was created “in response to the mapping archive of the Mining Institute Newcastle’s mapping library.”

“The installation is dictated by a set of environmental and bio data logs that myself and Ben collected during an expedition of a disused lead and fluorspar mine in Stanhope, Durham which were gathered using our own custom-built Arduino based data loggers,” writes Cotterill. “From these datalogs we then conceived an installation environment with sound and visuals directly derived from the data that we collected.”

Cotterill and Freeth used the SuperCollider programming language to code the installation’s visualization and sonification. To create the room’s field of sound, the two composed using “clouds of oscillators” controlled by data streams floating through the installation’s 8-speaker ambisonic field (full sphere surround sound).

The two 15-minute sonifications were paired with visuals crafted by blasting ultraviolet light onto fluorescent minerals and ores, such as fluorspar and uranium ore. As seen in the duo’s video, the fluorescent elements of the minerals and ore flicker and pulsate under the UV light, creating, as Cotterill wrote, “complex harmonics and spatial placement dictated by the data collected during the expedition” into the Stanhope mine.

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Worbla is a versatile material that I find endlessly fascinating. I’ve highlighted tutorials on working with Worbla several times and will continue to do so to encourage all of us to experiment with it. Erza Cosplay uses Worbla for armor frequently, and she manipulates it so that it has an embossed look. It really adds to the beauty and realism of the finished armor, and it’s easier to do than you might think.

Erza demonstrates how to create the embossed or half relief look in the above photo in her newest tutorial video. Basically, you cut a pattern from what appears to be craft foam and place it under the Worbla. Heating the Worbla makes it flexible, and you can then form it over the pattern and use a tool to accentuate all the details of the pattern.

Watch how it’s done:

Keep up with Erza’s latest costumes and tutorials at Facebook.

Since we first heard Telltale was going to extend George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire universe even further into video games, I’ve been dying to get my hands on a Bolton. I mean, a video game controller. Then a Bolton. Will I get my chance? Find out in the new trailer for Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series.

Episode 1 of 6: Iron From Ice, will be premiering tomorrow, December 2nd for PS4 and PC/Mac; on Wednesday December 3rd for Xbox One and Xbox 360, as well as PS4; Thursday December 4th for the iOS App Store. Tuesday December 9th will bring it to PS3 with Android-based devices getting access later this December.

Based on the award-winning HBO television drama series, Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series tells the story of House Forrester. Caught up in the events of The War of the Five Kings, they are placed in a precarious position where members of the household must do everything they can to prevent the house from meeting its doom.

Some cast members of the television series will reprise their roles in the game. While players will control five members of House Forrester in their story, the series will have them interacting with fan favorite characters throughout the season, including Tyrion Lannister performed by Peter Dinklage, Cersei Lannister performed by Lena Headey, Margaery Tyrell performed by Natalie Dormer, and Ramsay Snow performed by Iwan Rheon. Additional cast members will appear in later episodes.

The game series is based on the world, characters and events seen in HBO’s TV show, which in turn is based on George R. R. Martin’s books (A Song of Ice and Fire). The events in the game series begin towards the end of Season Three of the series, and end right before the beginning of Season Five. Players will visit familiar locations such as King’s Landing and The Wall, as well as unfamiliar locations such as Ironrath, the home of House Forrester.

Telltale says the first episode will take around two hours and fifteen minutes to play through and suggest doing it all in one go. The cost is $4.99 for the single episode or you can get a Season Pass package for all six episodes for $29.99.

Find out more on the Telltale website but for now, say hello to the members of House Forrester.

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House Forrester is a noble house from the Wolfswood in the north of Westeros. Bannermen to House Glover, they have always offered unswerving loyalty to the ruling great house of the North – the Starks. The Forresters are seated at Ironrath, an imposing stronghold surrounded by towering ironwood trees. Built over fifteen hundred years ago by Cedric Forrester and his triplet sons, Ironrath is a testament to the strength and endurance of Ironwood. The Forrester house words are ‘Iron from Ice’, which echoes their belief that – like the ironwood itself – the adverse conditions and unforgiving landscape of the North only makes them stronger.

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Samsung today announced a project among a group of its engineers to build an input device that allows people with limited mobility to operate a computer through eye movement alone. The EYECAN+ is a rectangular box that needs to be situated roughly 60-70cm away from a user's face. Once calibrated, it will superimpose a multifunction UI and track a user's eye movements to move the cursor where they want. Samsung says they won't be commercializing this device, but they'll soon be making the design open source for any company or organization who wants to start building them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The producer behind Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Knight Rider and Battlestar Galactica was often mocked as derivative, but he brought home screeen science fiction for generation X.

In her speech at the National Book Awards on Wednesday, Ursula K. Le Guin shares her Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters with “all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long,” blasts the commercialization of literature and the greed of publishers, and predicts:

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now . . . and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who remember freedom: poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.

Related Posts:

• This Week in Short Fiction
• This Week in Short Fiction
• The Literary Legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin
• Go Domingo Martinez!
• NBA Winners

Researchers showed that macaques were able to associate their actions on a joystick with an icon moving on a computer screen.

The post Monkeys Know What They’re Doing appeared first on WIRED.

A new colorful map reveals the geological history of the asteroid Vesta.

The post New Geologic Map Shows the Beauty of the Asteroid Vesta appeared first on WIRED.

Natalie Dormer, one true Queen of England and Westeros and the Capitol and Baker Street and our hearts, did an AMA yesterday on Reddit. Shall we see if she’s as charming as we want her to be? (Spoiler alert: she is).

The smirk is genetic.

Ser Pounce is a diva.

She loves Elementary (me too!)

She’s a Ravenclaw.

Ham?

She really loves cheese guys.

Fair.

Of course Pedro is hilarious.

She’s a girl after my own heart.

How dare.

I want to see a show with just the two of them.

 

Bonus: she was also on Conan.

You can read the whole AMA over on Reddit if you want to love her even more than you already do. All hail Queen Natalie!

(via Reddit, image via Gage Skidmore)

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New submitter Tucano writes The overtone singer Anna-Maria Hefele can sing two notes at the same time. In her latest video, spectrograms and frequency filters are used to explain how she can produce two melody lines at the same time, and how she uses her mouth to filter the frequencies of her voice. When the voice produces a sound, many harmonics (or overtones) sound at the same time, and we normally hear this as a single tone. In overtone singing, the mouth filters out all harmonics but one, and the one that remains is amplified to become louder. This is then perceived as a separate tone, next to the fundamental. In her video, Anna-Maria shows techniques that become increasingly advanced. She shows the overtone scale (steady fundamental, moving overtone), the undertone scale (steady overtone, moving fundamental), parallel movement and opposing movement of overtone and fundamental, and even complex compositions with two separate melody lines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Either the bar for being a Microsoft IT tech is so low a child can clear it, or five-year-old Ayan Qureshi is a genius. Luckily for IT people everywhere, it seems that young Qureshi is just very smart, but until he builds Skynet or whatever’s in store for his brilliant future, I’m still open to the possibility that Microsoft tech support is secretly just five-year-olds.

Nope. No smoke and mirrors here. I did not exaggerate this kid’s accomplishments for comedic effect. This is not a bait and switch. Qureshi simply studied with his father for a bit and then went and passed Microsoft’s IT exam to become the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in history. He told the BBC the exam was “difficult but enjoyable.” And then I believe he added, “Like that time I solved cold fusion, or when I built my time machine! Future you says hi, by the way.”

Qureshi’s father, Ayan, is in IT professional himself, and he found their biggest hurdle to be getting the child to understand the language of the test. “But he seemed to pick it up and has a very good memory,” Asim added. I should hope he’s got a good memory, because it’s going to be a while before labor laws allow him to put his certification to use.

In the meantime, he’s keeping his skills up in his own computer lab at home by building his own computer network, learning about operating systems and software for around two hours a day, and making snarky bloggers ponder their wasted intellectual potential.

(via Gizmodo, image via Sam Maggs)

Previously in child geniuses

• Another 5-year-old used his powers to hack an Xbox to play mature games
• Minecraft might be helping children develop
• Children are also very advanced in their ability to feel schadenfreude

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It reduces boulders to smears of ions. It dissolves and disintegrates the tallest mountains. Geologists call it "weathering." It sounds harmless enough, but weathering is one of the most destructive forces on the face of the planet.

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Bespoke lighting effects are returning the original colours to five faded masterpieces by artist Mark Rothko at Harvard Art Museums

Source: New Scientist - Discipline: Physics

An online platform for crowdsourcing environmental quality data launches its first sensor product.

The post A Goofy Wearable That Tracks the Air Quality Around You appeared first on WIRED.

From TedEd!

It’s a common saying that elephants never forget. But the more we learn about elephants, the more it appears that their impressive memory is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence that makes them some of the most social, creative, and benevolent creatures on Earth. Alex Gendler takes us into the incredible, unforgettable mind of an elephant.

Lesson by Alex Gendler, animation by Avi Ofer.

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Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!

Matt Stultz talks about the progress that 3d printer manufacturers have made towards accessibility – though often at the cost of open source licenses.

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Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

Use Arduino to control your christmas lights with text messages. via instructables

I really wanted to be able to control my Christmas lights remotely, with an Arduino.

With this solution you can control my Lights remotely, via text messages!

Skills needed:

Soldering
Wiring
Copy and Paste

Components Needed:

An Arduino Yun (Wifi Enabled!) – You could use another Arduino with a Wifi Shield though.
A Protoshield with (or without) a tiny breadboard
a regular breadboard will work as well, but will be less compact.
If you want to solder more, you can just use a small circuit board instead.
A 5V relay
A piezo buzzer
Wires
A battery operated Christmas decoration (It’s not even Thanksgiving, so I’m using a Halloween decoration)
A Temboo account (explained in next steps)
A Twilio account

Full tutorial

You know what that means, because we can’t do this sort of thing without controversy and a generous side order of knuckleheadedness.

Bowing to public pressure, the world’s largest textbook publisher has revised misleading language on global warming in a proposed Texas reader. But another major imprint has yet to do the same, worrying scientists and educators just a week before new textbooks are approved in the state.

Proposed wording in Pearson Education’s English textbook for Texas fifth-graders described climate change as a concern of “some scientists.” It then went on to say: “Scientists disagree about what is causing climate change.”

That wording rankled several leading scientific organizations, which point out that 97 percent of qualified scientists say that humans are overwhelmingly to blame for climate change.

The American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Center for Science Education raised complaints with the Texas State Board of Education, urging that the language be changed.

“For these textbooks to present climate change as a ‘debate,’ or to suggest that there is scientific uncertainty around the drivers of climate change, is to misrepresent our scientific understanding and do a disservice to our children,” AGU Executive Director Christine McEntee wrote in a recent letter to the board’s leadership.

In response, Pearson submitted a revised text to the Texas education board on Wednesday — less than a week before the agency votes to approve textbooks to be used at the start of the 2015 academic year.

The new language discusses climate change far less equivocally.

“Burning fuels like gasoline releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, which occurs both naturally and through human activities, is called a greenhouse gas, because it traps heat,” it says. “As the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases increase, the Earth warms. Scientists warn that climate change, caused by this warming, will pose challenges to society. These include rising sea levels and changes in rainfall patterns.”

[...]

Another industry heavyweight — McGraw-Hill — is sticking with language that scientists and some educators find objectionable. The sixth-grade geography text asks students to compare texts from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won a Nobel Prize in 2007, with one from the Heartland Institute, a conservative think-tank that has misrepresented climate science and attacked the reputations of climate researchers.

“It’s certainly encouraging that most of the publishers are making changes and revising their materials on climate change,” Quinn told VICE News. “It would be unfortunate if McGraw-Hill is the lone holdout at the end of all this.”

In the end, McGraw Hill came to their senses. There’s still room for improvement overall, but this was a nice result. Today is the day that the SBOE meets to approve (or not) new textbooks, and there are other bones of contention to be dealt with as they debate. As that Chron story notes, a 2011 law allows school districts to buy their own textbooks and not the SBOE-sanctioned ones if they want to. Local action is an option if you think it’s necessary. TFN, Newsdesk, Grist, and the National Journal have more.

Even though it took way too long (I had been admiring it for quite some time), I recently became the first kid on the block to own a Lytro. The Lytro, if you haven't heard, is sort of like a camera, except that it definitely isn't. Apart from a viewfinder on one end, a piece of glass on the other, and a shutter release button on top, it doesn't really look or feel like a point-and-shoot or SLR either. It actually bares a closer resemblance to a pocket-sized telescope. So don't you dare call it a camera. Indeed, the thing that the Lytro is built to do is what makes it completely different than any camera, and this perhaps, is the best mark of its identity. It captures not only the intensity of the light rays hitting the sensor (or film), but the directionality of those light rays as well.

So what. Right? What does this mean? Why is this interesting? It means that with a light-field camera, the focal point and depth of field are parameters that can be controlled by the viewer. It is interesting because of freeing up of space and of the physical atoms of hardware by deliberately removing the motorized auto-focus mechanism, and placing instead into the capable and powerful hands of software. I find it particularly elegant that this technology was acheived as a result of harnessing light's true nature better than any other camera that came before it. A device designed to to record light as light is; a physical property defined by both a magnitude and a direction.

How do I interact with this picture? 

Normally this would be a weird question to ask, but with the Lytro the viewer can take part in the imaging process in three ways. Try it out on the samples above:

• Point to focus: collecting the light field from a scene is a technical thing. Creating images by deciding what to focus on, and what to not focus on is an artistic thing. It is an interpretive thing. It's a narrative that the viewer has with the data. The goal of the light field camera is not to impose a narrative, but instead get entirely out of the way.
• Extended focus: for artistic reasons, the viewer might want to have some parts of the image in focus, other parts out of focus. It's how our eyes work; our peripheral vision. But in cases where you want to see the full depth of field, where everything is in focus, the software has an algorithm for that (to try it out you can press 'E' on your keyboard).
• Stereo viewing: speaks to the multidimensional nature of the vector field data. In the real world, when we move our head, the foreground moves faster than the background. So too with light-field images, you can simulate parallax, by moving your cursor and better understand the spatial relationship between objects in the scene.

These capabilities aren't just components of the device, they are technological paradigms embodied by the device. That, to me, is what is so incredibly beautiful about this technology. It's the best example of what technology should be: a material thing that improves the work of the mind.

A call to the seismic industry

The seismic wavefield is what we should be giving to the interpreter. This probably means engineering a seismic system where less work is done by the processor, and more control is given to the interpreter through software that does the heavy lifting. Interpreters need to have direct feedback with the medium they are interpreting. How does seismic have to change to allow that narrative?

Comet 67P is quite large. How does it's size compare to other large objects I have used in previous blog posts?

The post How Big Is Comet 67P? appeared first on WIRED.

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Civil defense officials in Hawaii went door-to-door last night handing out evacuation notices to residents in the immediate downslope path of the Puna lava flow. Read the rest

By twisting photons into spirals as they travel, large amounts of information can be encoded in light and used for long-distance communication

Source: New Scientist - Discipline: Physics

And those things aren't true, according to an Ipsos-Mori poll that put the USA second-from-the-top in the race to see who's the most ignorant, preceded only by Italians. Read the rest

spadadot writes French-based startup has just launched a website that will let you add your skills to a comprehensive map of human skills. As quoted from their website "We aim to build the largest, most accurate, multilingual skills database ever made, by allowing a diverse and skillful community to contribute their individual skills to the global map." The ontology is simple: skills can have zero or more sub-skills. Every new skill is available in all supported languages (only English and French at the moment). The crowdsourced data is free for non-commercial use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.