Blogs

Dutch artist Theo Jansen creates creatures powered by the wind that are able to react to their environment. These amazing creatures are built to live on the beach and are able to store up wind energy and detect when the tide is in. He uses genetic algorithms to evolve new breeds of these animals before building them.

I like the idea of communities having their own take on something. The Cube Cinema in Bristol for the past four years has been perfecting their own brand of cola. Well, I call it a brand: they have open-sourced the recipe. Here are their adventures. They plan to celebrate on the 25th August with a non-brand promotional party. Brings back memories of the Brewhouse which was just round the corner which brewed its beer in the basement.

An amazing demonstration of a technology under development that promises to, not only identify similar images, but piece them together like a jigsaw. Each photograph (or image) is stitched together to form a seamless image, which can be navigated in a very natural way.

The new kid on the block, which must have a number of banks wondering, is money lending sites--- otherwise known as peer-to-peer lending. These sites put people who want to borrow money in touch with people who have money to lend. These sites score the borrowers using the traditional credit scoring techniques and this is used to indicate the risk to the lenders who might lend money.

In the end the borrower gets the money they want a loan at a good rate and the borrower gets a good rate of return: often much better than a bank.

Moving back to working with C++ in visual studio can often be painful after working with Java. I find myself cursing the missing refactoring functions and code navigation that you take for granted in Java. Jetbrains resharper might be really good for VB and C# but where does that leave C++. Well recently we've started to use Visual Assist X which, dispite it's name, is a real lifeline and works like a dream.

How research into brains might help the future.