Brian McVicker, a loyal listener of the show (which is coming back into circulation soon) is, much like myself, a connoisseur of the ancient Japanese art of elegant desktop design. It’s the kind of thing that it takes a special breed of person to appreciate, but for us, it is akin to admiring a beautiful automobile. So, humbly, I submit the screenshots of my efforts.

Current system setup:

ACER Aspire Laptop 9500 with an 1.5GHz Intel processor and integrated Intel graphics chipset 915

1GB system RAM

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Compiz Fusion desktop effects enabled using the Emerald Window Decorator

GTK and Emerald theme NOVA gold, with icon set and suggested background by Lyrae

Font: Segoe UI

Themes available at www.gnome-look.org

(Active programs in screenshot: GAIM instant messenger client, VLC media player, Terminal)

Bottom shot contains desktop running Avant Window Navigator with reflections and glass engine enabled.

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Here, have some leaked HALO 3 video

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I know this isn’t the kind of thing I normally post, but, wow.

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 Episode 22 [79:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Episode 22 of the Unsayable Podcast is now available for download. This week Chris and I discuss NASA space command, high-tech chain mail, and a long discussion about the Nintendo Wii. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Subscribe through iTunes or the RSS links in the right hand column.

Stories for this show include:

• New state of matter discovered
• Can you compute a 248 dimensional object?
• High-tech miniature chain mail
• The space shuttle is a no-fly zone
• Get brain damaged, become like Spock
• PlayStation Home revealed-zorz
• It’s a little Big Planet after all
• Denis Dyack saying the Unsayable
• Three different ways to own Halo 3, and the people rejoiced!
• Sony boss calls America a land of “cheap people”
• Xbox 360 Elite sku revealed
• Wii is CRAP
• Wii is a FAD

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 Episode 21 [69:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Episode 21 of the Unsayable Podcast is now available for download. This week Chris, Bart, and I discuss stem cells for breast enhancement, a new quantum computer, and femme bots of the future. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Subscribe through iTunes or the RSS links in the right hand column.

Stories for this show include:

• Stem cells for breast enhancement
• D-WAVE busts out quantum computer
• Mirror blanks completed for James Webb Space Telescope
• Tufts university creates soft bodied robots

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Those wacky stem cells, who knows what they’ll do next? Apparently, they will be mixed with your own fat cells to then be injected into breasts to provide a more “natural” way to enhance your bust. Well, that is if your definition of natural involves the words “injection” or “stem cell,” all jokes aside this technique is already been used successfully in Japan and will being coming to the EU very soon. From the reading I’ve done it appears as though the extent of the augmentation is related to the amount of body fat you already have, so that larger women will receive a bigger boost than their smaller sisters. It is not all breast related though, there have been pioneering uses of this method to restore facial disfigurements and even repair a damaged heart. But, if I was a betting man, and I am, I would be willing to place a large sum of money on the fact that the minute the female American population has the option of just getting a shot to swell their breasts rather than invasive breast implant surgery, you’ll never know if your woman has the real thing or not.

Hit the link to the BBC for the whole lowdown.

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I don’t want to delve too deeply into this subject, since if you hit the link at the end of this post you will find a much more intelligent discussion of this story than I could give here, however there are a few things I would like to say about this article. This computer that d-wave has demonstrated is not ready for your desktop.

As you can see from this picture this thing won’t fit on your desk. It also has to be cooled to within a smidgen of absolute zero, colder than interstellar space. This is also a very early prototype, and while there is still much debate on what these researchers have actually accomplished, it is enough to say that they have designed a very new architecture that has the potential to scale up to something that is very powerful. And again, I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to explain Schroedinger’s bit, suffice it say, quantum computers are here, and it’s only going to get more interesting from here on out.

Hit the link to Ars for the full story

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The mirror blanks for the James Webb space telescope (formerly the Next Generation Space Telescope NGST) have been completed by AXSYS technologies and after polishing and fitting they will create the largest mirror array ever found on a non-terrestrial telescope. The JWST will be important for several reasons. First, it will not see in the visible light spectrum like our eyes and the Hubble telescope do, rather it will collect light in the infrared wavelength which will allow it to capture light that would have been blocked by dust and gas in the optical wavelength. Second will be the mirroring system. If JWST was using a single mirror like the Hubble, the mirror would have been too large to get into orbit aboard a rocket, that’s why it is using an array of mirrors that are folded up like the petals of a flower until it reaches it’s target location (the 2nd laGrange point) and then deploys or unfolds its mirrors. While the project is still a while away from getting launched, creating the beryllium mirror blanks is an important first step in what will be the extra-planetary telescope for the next generation.

Hit the link for SpaceRef for the full story

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What words do you think of when you think of the word robot? Metal, hard, steel, glowing red eyes, deadly killing machine, soulless automaton? Well maybe some of those, anyways researchers at Tufts University have been working on engineering soft-bodied robots for use across a broad spectrum of applications. The picture at the top here shows one of their prototypes based on a completely soft-bodied animal, the caterpillar. Using systems that mimic biological methods of locomotion will allow robots to attain a much more natural way of moving around in the environment because rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, they are taking their cue from Nature who has had a long time to perfect efficient methods of locomotion. While the caterpillar is just the first start, what other shapes might robots take now that they are not bound to the forms of rigid metal construction? Nobody knows, but I think I have a pretty good guess….

That’s right, deadly FemBots

Hit the link to ScienceDaily for more info

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