If I had to pick a hammer or a tiny piece of porcelain to shatter a car window, I’d probably think nothing of it and grab the mallet. NatGeo proves me wrong. A little itty bitty piece of porcelain chipped off a spark plug does much more damage to a car window and is so much more easy to use too. Just chuck it at the window! Tempered glass works funny like that.
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Her was an interesting movie, to say the least. It’s difficult to understand how someone could fall in love and develop a relationship with an operating system, but we might just see more of that happening with the release of EmoSPARK.
It’s an artificial intelligence console that was designed to interact with its users on a personal level. EmoSPARK was created “to allow for a true and meaningful understanding between technology and the human emotional spectrum.” In short, it’s more or less designed to be a constant companion of sorts that users can communicate with and “call” from a number of devices, including tablets, smartphones, laptops, and even TVs.
EmoSPARK collects data and builds an emotional profile graph based on your interactions with it, so it can relate to you when you talk to it. It’s built with emotion detection, conversational intelligence, Wikipedia knowledge (yes, it’s smart too), social games, and move.
EmoSPARK is up for funding on Indiegogo through 2/22/14, where a minimum pledge of $224(USD) will get you one of your very own.
[via Dvice]
World War I often gets overshadowed by World War II in the history books, which makes sense because WWII scarred our planet forever, but WWI and its aftermath was a terrible and awful moment in history that helped shaped the rest of the century (and beyond) as well. If you forgot about some stuff that happened or didn’t pay attention when you were a self-centered high school student, just watch this really smart animation by John D. Ruddy and Manny Man. It teaches you more about WWI than history class ever did.
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If you’re curious about what would happen if a perfectly hit cue ball hit a perfectly aligned pool rack perfectly in the middle, well here’s what it will look like. It’s mathematically perfect. Not even the best pool players in the world, magnet breakers or robots can even get it to look like this.
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Nothing lives forever, not even our universe. Eventually it’ll go kaput and be destroyed… but how? Smart people have wrapped their heads around the universe’s destruction and have come upwith three different theories. The Big Rip, Heat Death (or the Big Freeze) and the Big Crunch and Big Bounce. They all sound like they’re going to hurt.
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The Olympics are coming! The Olympics are coming! And even if it’s only the Winter Olympics, it’s still fun to see countries who know nothing about each other put on colorful spandex to beat each other up for medals. But did you know that the gold medal is actually made from silver? Or that the bronze medal is only valued at 4 bucks? Watch and learn some other Olympic facts in the video above.
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Crushing cans with your bare hands or stepping on them with your full body weight or shooting them with a bb gun are all fun ways to destroy an aluminum can. What might be most fun is letting it crush itself. How? Magical pressure.
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Here’s a fun little brain wrinkle pinch for all you non-math people out there (that should be everyone in the world*): the sum of all natural numbers, from one to infinity, is not a ridiculously big number like you would expect but actually just -1/12. Yes, the sum of every number from one to infinity is some weird negative fraction. What the heck?
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We were once toddlers before. We’ve gotten drunk as recent as a few days ago. We maybe got too sore from working out. And we’re not always perfectly balanced. We know how awkward it can be sometimes to just… walk. It’s okay! It’s not always as easy as it looks! Look, even computer simulations tasked to figure out how to walk sometimes fall face down on the floor.
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When we watch movies, we pay attention to specific parts of the scene and focus on different actors and look at certain things on the screen. Most of what we see is influenced by what the directors want us to see, our attentions are easy to grab after all. So what if you showed the same movie to computers? What would they see? How would the movies look to them?
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
