Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo. Computers and physics go together like Jimi Hendrix and a guitar. One was practically made for the other.  Computational physics was one of the very first applications of computers and, indeed, along with decrypting military codes, virtual physics was one of the very uses that lead [...]

When I first heard about Twitter in 2007, my initial reaction was something along the lines of “That is the silliest idea I have ever heard of.”  Time has proven me wrong and I was determined not to make the same mistake with the newest hot trend in the social web: GeoLocation based social networks [...]

When the first computers were being developed, every functional aspect of the computer had to be programmed into every program.  Want your program to use a keyboard? You would have to program your punch-cards to handle this.  Want to output to a printer? You have to do that too.  Eventually, machines became powerful enough and [...]

[We talked extensively about Facebook and privacy this week on the show.  Stay tuned for our upcoming episode.] The uncanny valley is an effect in computer graphics where as depictions of humans become more and more realistic, they become more off-putting.  Yosemite Sam looks nothing like a human and is not nearly as creepy as [...]

I will bet that you don’t even think about alt-tab as a problem, but you struggle with it every day.  You are working on a blog post while alt-tabbing to a reference article on the subject.  Suddenly an IM window pops up.  You say hi to your friend and then alt tab back to your [...]

What is the point of designing the super-AI for your all-powerful robotic army if your drones can barely pick up their battle orders? One of the ongoing issues in robotics is that creating ways for robots to interact with the world in meaningful ways is surprisingly difficult.  Researchers at Festo have unveiled an impressively dextrous [...]

Gizmodo bought an iPhone last week. Rumor has it they paid upwards of $5000 to $10,000 for this iPhone, which is a bit much, even by Apple’s pricey standards, but evidently the reason for this outrageous price was that this device is a pre-release version of Apple’s new fourth-generation iPhone that is to be released this June. The internet went wild.

Well, this is a small but welcome update: Microsoft’s new phone OS iss is here-to-forth to be referred to as ‘Windows Phone 7′, which is a welcome relief to those of us who have spent the last 2 months since it’s announcement trying to say ‘Windows Phone Seven Series’ over and over. Seriously, I am [...]

We discussed a few weeks ago on the run-down a new type of nuclear reactor that utilized depleted uranium and that theoretically be built on a much smaller and safer scale than traditional reactors.  Well it appears that we were not the only ones who noticed this technology as Bill Gates and Toshiba have thrown [...]

[Note: We had some responses from our listeners concerning a recent episode in which we were fairly harsh on Facebook.  This post grew out of those conversations.] Why do we hate on Facebook so much?  I will admit that I think sometimes we get a bit carried away with it.  Its cool to hate the [...]