The personal weblog of Ivan Reyes

Let's visit the uncanny valley

2008-03-31T04:46:46Z

This CGI woman in flash is awesome and creepy.

The Uncanny Valley links:
Wikipedia on the Uncanny Valley
more info on the Uncanny Valley

via (Boing Boing)

How many 5 year olds can you take? 23.

2008-02-29T22:43:03Z

I didn't try to skew my answers to get that number. I promise. :)

Edward Tufte in Atlanta

2008-02-16T19:16:52Z

I am looking forward to this one-day course with Edward Tufte, at the Atlanta Grand Hyatt on March 24th and 25th.

funny names site updated

2008-01-13T01:26:40Z

I updated the funnynames.com site the other day, and I thought It would be great to set up a gallery of illustrations submitted by the people. It would be sort of like the 700 hoboes project at e-hobo.com.

I asked R.Land to submit a cool t-shirt idea for the site a few years back and thought it would be great to launch the gallery with his illustration.

Other 700 projects:

Bidi bidi bidi - Twiki @ DragonCon 2007

2007-09-02T00:08:19Z

Dragon Con 2007 is on!
I got an autographed picture of TWIKI [Felix Silla]

Rhodesian Ridgeback Puppies for sale

2007-08-21T11:48:29Z

Update:They have all been sold. Our neighbors had some Ridgeback puppies for sale.
I posted a page with more info for them.

Rhodesian Ridgeback Puppies

Character Sketchbook page 001

2007-07-15T00:18:27Z

Here are two pages out of my sketchbook of characters.
I started this in February but haven't had a chance to post them.
I want to clean them up and perhaps vectorize them. you can click on the image for a larger image.

Billy Ray Shyster's House of Discount Special Effects

2007-07-01T22:16:56Z

I love this video.
I found it the other day while cleaning my basement.
It was on the Siggraph 97 Visual Proceedings CD-ROM.

LOLBOTS!!!

2007-05-31T19:10:38Z

LOLBots! is an awsome new site mixing the LOLCats meme with robots.
The pics above are my entries.

Genre Porn - a definition

2007-03-29T12:34:27Z

I am calling out a new meme. It is made possible by the saturation of information available now.

Genre Porn: a highly saturated, "over the top" example of a "style", "category" or "kind", where the form, technique, content, subject mater, tone or theme are exploited to the fullest extent possible with current technology or creation methods.

In order for Genre Porn to work properly, there needs to be a large number of existing examples of that genre to combine for full effect.

One example of Genre Porn is the upcoming Tarantino/Rodriguez film "Grindhouse".

Other examples are cable channels such as "The Food Network".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre

dynamically balancing walking humanoid robot

2007-02-28T16:46:06Z

anybots has designed the this awesome dynamically balancing walking humanoid robot. The video is spectacular! I love the way the other robot is poking it to try to make it fall down.

- Motion Planning for Humaniod Robots
- BDI - Big Dog
- Robots playing soccer video
- RobotSavvy website
- Space Robot Bonanza! < this is hilarious!!

In the future you will grow your home

2007-02-10T21:58:05Z

Popsci has an article about growing your own home, as does Physorg.

I have been talking about this for years. I always liked the idea of growing it from one seed or spore, similar to the way that a mushroom sprouts overnight from a spore to the top heavy structure that it is.
In my vision I see it growing very quickly and then hardening or petrifying to a usable structure.
You would have to feed it some sort of material perhaps some type of organic waste. (maybe soylent green)
Their process is probably closer to happening then my crazy idea. I think it would be a combination of bio-engineering and nanotech.

This is a different type of growing but in the same vein.

Contour Crafting will print one for you layer by layer.

squidoo post on Arborsculpture
Growing Home
The Chair that grew
Plantware
The man that grew his own chairs
Treedome

Hot quantum computer

2007-02-08T17:46:56Z

more quantum computer porn here. Oh yeah baby!

DNA Rainbow

2007-02-08T17:11:17Z

DNA Rainbow took the genetic code from huge data files and assigned a color to every one of the four bases. Rendering human genetic code in color. Interesting and strange patterns emerge. I was kind of hoping to get a 3d image by crossing my eyes like those 3d noise images (SIRDS) I used to create with KPT 3D Stereo Noise.

But alas, it was not to be.

Single Image Random Dot Stereograms software:

SIRDS
Techmind owns the algorithm used to make these.

Found Photo Number 0001

2007-02-03T14:35:09Z

This is a photo I found a long time ago in an antique store in south florida.
I love this photo. The look in their eyes and the cigarettes dangling from their mouths.
They have lived a hard life. But they have each other.
The shadow of the photographer is very ominous.
I have a bunch that I am going to scan in and upload maybe post to my flickr account, or maybe just here.
There are a few great ones.