Drawings of Early Microscopes Show Artistry in the Pursuit of Science [Retromodo]

Ah, where would science be if not for the contributions of the humble microscope? Did you know that the development of the world’s first microscope began in 11th century Iraq, when scientist and polymath Ibn al-Haytham recorded all sorts of data about lenses, binocular vision, mirrors and observable properties of light his The Book of Optics? That would make this pioneering technology more than a thousand years old. BibliOdyssey has amassed a great collection of drawings of pre-20th century microscopes and some of them look more like art pieces than instruments of science. Check out my favorites: [Bibliodyssey via MAKE]

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Pioneer Sneaks Out $2200 Elite BDP-09FD; First Blu-ray Player That Crushes the PS3 [Home Theater]

Last May Pioneer told us that autumn would bring a “super duper” Blu-ray player—the most powerful Blu-ray player ever built. It makes up for the current crop, which are lower in price but are missing key features like BD-Live for internet-based content. Well, not a leaf has fallen off a tree, yet here it is already, the $2,200 Elite BDP-09FD. Feature-wise, the best Blu-ray player on the market has been the PS3—turns out, an extra $1,700 will buy you something that kills Sony’s game console as far as Blu-ray and other media are concerned.

As you probably guessed, Pioneer finally accepts the need for 2.0. This will come with Ethernet and be fully capable of BD-Live playback, no firmware updates needed at the get-go. Unlike other BD-Live players, which require SD cards, this one comes with 4GB of internal memory for downloads.

The thing is a Mack truck, 45 or 50 lbs. of steel and aluminum with everything mounted carefully to eliminate vibration. The bottom layer of the aluminum-housed chassis is a quarter-inch plate of solid steel, and it’s even got feet from a Japanese company called TAOC, supposedly the most vibration-free platform you can get. There are no wires inside either; all connections are physically mounted from the circuit board to the walls to reduce noise.

Pioneer says all of the engineering is so that this can be a single box that replaces some home theater snob’s high-end CD player, DVD player and previous-gen Blu-ray player, blowing each in turn out of the water.

In the audio department, Pioneer recommends using this for decoding all music and movie soundtrack, and going analog out with those gold-plated 7.1 RCA jacks. It’s decodes all known codecs from DTS and Dolby using a separate digital-to-analog converter for each channel. This is a little like having a separate motor for each wheel of your car. Combining this with some crazy audio engineering, they created a way for “completely perfect noise-free signal” to come through RCA jacks instead of the costlier old-school XLR jacks. “It’s far better than what you find in most receivers,” says Pioneer’s Chris Walker. In fact, everything, including speaker preferences and other receiver-like tweaks, are adjustable from inside the player.

It’s also got that crazy CD-playback technique first seen on Pioneer’s summer models: When used with certain Pioneer receivers, it produces jitter-free disc playback.

In terms of video, it has 1080p/24 for Blu-ray and DVD content too, as you might expect, with a best-on-the-market image processor also found in Meridian’s crazy 10-megapixel projector.

The 09’s next-level achievement is that it upconverts color information to 16 bits, previously unheard of because nobody had a system that could handle 16-bit color data. (Pioneer had to build their own for this mission.) That means that each picture can have up to “2,800 trillion” (um, 2.8 quadrillion??) colors, which the processor interpolates by looking at each frame of the Blu-ray’s 8-bit color movie. Though most TVs only process 10-bit, Walker says that it’s better to send over a richer signal that the TV has to tone down, than letting the TV upgrade the Blu-ray data itself. When TVs hit 16-bit, this sucka will be ready.

Cooler to me are the two HDMI jacks on the back. It’s a first for a Blu-ray player (or PS3), and it means you can hook up the same player to both your projector and your flat-panel display without a splitter or some on-the-fly rewiring. You can even split it up so that HDMI 1 only does audio, while HDMI 2 does video, freeing up more video bandwidth, especially in those pesky longer cables that might get a bit choked. The HDMI can detect the source, and automatically determine what audio and video to send over.

Obviously, some people are going to be content with their PS3s for the time being (after all, they are only $500, a small price by comparison). And Walker acknowledges that speed is always going to be the saving grace of the game console. (”If we were to build a Blu-ray player around an Intel or Cell processor, we’d have those kinds of speeds too.”) But as far as picture and audio output, nothing quite resembles this “super duper” machine. And on top of all that, we can stop bitching about Pioneer ignoring BD-Live, and getting on with the future. Now, seriously, why would ANYONE buy Pioneer’s last batch? Save your money, home-theater snobs. This badass will be out soon. [Pioneer]

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36-Inch Twitching Spider: Your Worst Nightmare in Lamp Form [Lighting]

I have yet to meet someone who is genuinely not creeped out by spiders, so I would imagine that you could get a lot of laughs out of a 36-incher that features four twitching legs illuminated by purple incandescent lights. It would be great as a Halloween decoration, or for placing next to your partner in bed. Nothing starts a morning right like watching a loved one pee their pants and let out and a shrill, girlish scream. Now, that’s invigorating. Available for $70. [Hammacher via Boing Boing Gadgets]

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Filed under: Robots

VIA may be ditching its traditional motherboard business, but it looks like its not wasting any time in stepping up its efforts to get its more specialized boards and chipsets into as many devices as possible, and it’s now taken advantage of the Taipei International Robot Show to show off their potential for robotics. Leading the way is Lynxmotion’s Johnny 5 robot above (yes, that’s actually its name), which has been outfitted with VIA’s new EPIA P700 board and VX800 unified chipset just for the show. That, VIA says, offers a whole host of advantages over other systems, including “far easier” software development. Of course, VIA also sees plenty of potential beyond hobby kits, with it also showing off an EPIA Mini-ITX-based version of the Vecna Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot (or BEAR), and it touting the benefits of its Pico-ITX platform for all sorts of “extremely space constrained robotics designs.”

[Via Far East Gizmos]

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Via [Engadget]

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A Skyscraper So Tall Builders Can’t Use Walkie-Talkies [Burj Dubai]

If you want to build a skyscraper 2,275 feet tall, you will face engineering challenges comparable to those of the Space Shuttle just because its sheer size. One of them is communications. When the unbelievable Burj Dubai started to get really high, the construction workers discovered one problem that seems obvious now: their walkie-talkies stopped working as they climbed the structure.

The reason was simple: distance. At the beginning of the construction they used walkie-talkies—which are light, durable, and have a long battery life—across the site. However, these stopped working after some time, as the tower kept raising over the desert. With unreliable communications, Samsung Corporation—the main contractor—had to turn to a different kind of link between workers to avoid misunderstandings that may have jeopardized the safety of workers (even more, because plenty of people have had fatal accidents in the tower) and delayed the project.

Fortunately for them, they turned to mesh networks, which are similar to the ones used in mobiles, but local. For that they used a company called Firetide, using several Wi-Fi-enabled VoIP phones over a HotPort wireless mesh, which also serves as the transport for the security video in the site.

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OLPC achieves goal of One Laptop Per Child… on The Rock

Filed under: Laptops

One Laptop Per Child. That was the lofty goal set out by NickNeg before Intel ever dreamed of a Classmate PC. Today that goal was realized although perhaps on a smaller scale than the non-profit may have hoped. The tiny, South Pacific island nation of Niue (known locally as “The Rock”) just issued a shiny new laptop to every sticky-fingered, primary and secondary school miscreant — that’s 500 in total for a island of 1,500 people. Seems, high-schoolers have been fitted with the freebie as well to go along with the free Internet access provided to all the island’s inhabitants. Luxembourg, you paying attention?

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AIM Finally Released for Windows Mobile [Aim]

It’s been in beta for the last few months, but for Windows Mobile users who’d rather not risk their phone to be a lab rat in a suit, AIM for Windows Mobile is now in final release form. If you are on your mobile now, just go to this link and hit “products” to make the download. If you are on a Windows Mobile device and you don’t want AIM, then we are truly, truly sorry for wasting your time. Feel free to drop by Brian Lam’s place for a personal apology via back rub any time. No, it won’t be strange at all. [AOL via MobileBurn]

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Intel Opens Door for Army of MacBook Air Clones [Intel]

Muffled by the cacophony of like a million netbooks and the wireless power that’ll power our cyborg brains at the Intel Developer Forum was the low-key introduction of Intel’s next-gen 45nm dual core chips for ultra-thin notebooks—i.e., the dwarven chips that made the MacBook Air possible. Now that everybody can snag them, expect a surge of similarly limber notebooks that can suck in their gut to fit into narrow pockets of ugly paper.

Lenovo’s X301 and HP’s 2530p already use the new chips. The SL9400 and SL9300 running at 1.8Ghz and 1.6GHz, respectively, both have a 1066MHz FSB and appear to be the Core 2 Duo Low Voltage (LV) chips with a TDP of 17W, while the SU9400 and SU9300 are the ULV variants, clocked at 1.4GHz and 1.2GHz with a 10W TDP.

While the clock speeds of the LV chips are the same as the MBA’s, the switch to the 45nm process and faster front-side bus should yield both performance gains and power savings. More importantly, their ready availability for all-comers could make the ultra-thin market a lot more interesting, though we’re kind of afraid at this point of what Asus will do with them. [Ars Technica]

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Death Race: Filmed by Running Cameras Over [Death Race]

In an era when most stunt-driven blockbusters are really half cartoon, Death Race’s director Paul W.S. Anderson insisted on keeping the action real. The shooting philosophy was something along the lines of, “why blow up a fake car when you can blow up a real one?” So the movie features of ton of real cars packed with real armor plating and real machine guns really crashing. And during an interview with io9, Anderson revealed how he rammed these monster cars into cameras without smashing his film equipment into tiny bits.

I wanted to get the cars to drive into the cameras at high speeds, so we built one of my favorite rigs. We built a rig that had a camera and was completely ringed with basketballs. So it was this big giant ball. We stick it in the middle of the road, and the cars would drive at it. There is a shot in the very first race, when the original Frankenstein drives, where the car slides around the corner, and it looks like it hits the camera, and it does. And then the continuation of that is really funny because the camera just rolls away, bounces away, and it hits the wall.

I don’t know about you, but I just got a lot more interested in the movie. Read the full interview with Anderson over at io9. [io9][Image]

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Snapture 2.0 Further Improves iPhone’s Camera [IPhone Apps]

Snapture’s one-upped their third-party jailbreak iPhone camera suite with Snapture 2.0, which brings multi-touch gesture zoom, cleaner user interface a delay timer and four color modes. You can also now delete pictures on the “viewfinder” which is nice, or go slightly more advanced with the self-timer and the ability to shut off rotation. It’s free as long as you jailbreak your iPhone, but $7.99 if you want the premium version without ads and with QuickView delete/thumbnail stack/thumbnail enlarge. [Snapture]

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