Monday, October 8, 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
Digam-me lá de quem têm medo agora, do sonho americano ou da mãe china?
Monday, September 3, 2007
Starfish Robot Shows Robotic Introspection And Self-Modeling
A new four-legged robot can automatically synthesize a predictive model of its own topology (where and how its body parts are connected), and then successfully move around. It can also use this "proprioceptive" sense to determine if a component has been damaged, and then model new movements that take the damage into account.
(Starfish robot and friends [L->R, Zykov, Bongard, Lipson])
In their article, Josh Bongard, Victor Zykov, and Hod Lipson describe their experiment:
We demonstrate, both computationally and experimentally, how a legged robot automatically synthesizes a predictive model of its own topology (where and how its body parts are connected) through limited yet self-directed interaction with its environment, and then uses this model to synthesize successful new locomotive behavior before and after damage. The legged robot learned how to move forward based on only 16 brief self-directed interactions with its environment. These interactions were unrelated to the task of locomotion, driven only by the objective of disambiguating competing internal models. These findings may help develop more robust robotics, as well as shed light on the relation between curiosity and cognition in animals and humans...
(Starfish robot introspects, modeling itself)
If the robot is damaged, it can sense the problem and attempt to compensate. The robot has tilt and angle sensors in all of its joints; readings from these sensors are used by the robot to create a self-image. If sensors indicate that a part is missing or damaged, it changes its image of itself and moves on.
(Starfish robot top view)
As for sf references, everybody remembers the HAL-9000 unit that ran the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL was also able to sense problems in the ship and then get one if its servants (the human astronauts) to install new components, if necessary.
Despite their achievement, the researchers remain modest in the face of nature. "We never officially named it, but we usually refer to it as the Starfish robot, even though a real starfish has five rather than four legs," said lead researcher Josh Bongard, now at the University of Vermont. "Also, a real starfish is much better than our robot at recovering from injury, because it can actually regrow its legs."
Update 24-Nov-2006: See a remarkable Starfish robot video.
Take look as some earlier work by Lipson and Zykov et al in this article - Self-Replicating Modular Robots. More materials here, including a video, as well as here.| Thanks to an anonymous reader who suggested this article. Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 11/17/2006)http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=823
I just had to pass along this cool video showing the remarkable Starfish robot created by Josh Bongard, Victor Zykov, and Hod Lipson.
Towards the end of the video, the robot conceptualizes itself, determining its own structure using sensors built into each joint. Then, it thinks of different ways that it might move - walk - from place to place.
Starfish can also sense damage to any of its legs or joints, and then compensate. See Starfish Robot Shows Robotic Introspection And Self-Modeling. Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 8/17/2007)
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Saturday Night Live especial de natal.
Oiçam este senhor com esta guitarra, excelente. Será que por debaixo daquele chapéu está alguém conhecido?
1º videoclip do top 5 dos My Chemical Romance - Famous Last Words
A ovelha negra, acho que a única explicação para este sucesso todo deve ter sido por mesmo tão mau mas tão mau que pronto toda a gente quis ver para acreditar.
Não se esqueçam esta era a menina que era uma grande esperança, uma grande voz mundial,
depois deu nesta merda.
(Por direitos não é possível colocar o video no blog apartir do link original coloquei aqui um alternativo)
Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend Video - MyVideo
Para descontrair, pa rir, interessante, cá está...
top 5 do youtube :)
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Aqui ficam duas músicas dela.
Fuck me Pumps do album Frank de 2003 (o primeiro dela)
Rehab do album Back to Black de 2007 (o segundo e último, por enquanto)
Born into an English-Jewish family with a history of jazz musicians, she grew up in the suburb of Southgate, North London, and attended Ashmole School. At around age 10, Winehouse founded a short-lived amateur rap group called Sweet 'n' Sour, as Sour. She described the group as "the little white Jewish Salt-N-Pepa". She attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School aged 12 but was expelled at 13 for "not applying herself" and piercing her own nose. She later attended the BRIT School in Selhurst, Croydon.
She grew up listening to a diverse range of music (from Salt 'n' Pepa to Sarah Vaughan) and received her first guitar aged 13.
After her friend, soul singer Tyler James, gave her demo tape to an A&R person, she was discovered and began singing professionally at age 16.
More about Amy
On a good day in London you might actually hear the sound of the melting pot. In a cafe there could be jazz. As the cars go by, hip hop beats and basslines. Some old reggae booming from the neighbourhood vinyl shop. Home, and your noisy flat mate's blaring TV on the R'n'B channel. It's not going to happen every day, but over a lifetime, even a short one of nineteen years, the history of sweet, strong urban sounds might rub into a person's blood, and that person might grow up musically wise before their years. It could be a girl, white or black. She could be funny, tough, smart, idealistic and devoted to musicianship. If she had a voice that was timeless and salaciously textured and capable of melting concrete even on low heat, that would be too good to wish for.
Amy Winehouse, daughter of the city and pupil of the wide musical universe of "stuff that has soul" is just such a walking, emoting miracle. Born and raised in North London, she spent her teenage years balancing school and boyfriends with hours locked in her bedroom, ears glued to classic song chord changes. Her voice however was clearly living a secret life, staying out, getting high, breaking down, going to prison and violating parole by leaving the country with a gun toting maniac gangster. At least it sounds that way. She has the vocal prodigy bit covered. If words have already worn themselves out trying to describe the horny, sleazy, salty spiritual, worldly wise, late night, tired of bullshit, downtown, flirty velvet resonance that makes for a great soul-jazz singer they're going to fall apart entirely over Amy. That vocal ability would be something in itself, but Camden Girl Sings The Blues is only half the headline here. Amy is not the kind of girl to accept the gift of vocal skills, sit back and replicate what others have done before her. Without making it into a grand plan, and proceeding as if it was the most natural thing in the world (because it is) she has taken her love of jazz and soul and added an infusion of seriously fresh perspective. She might sound like a 40s jazz singer, but she's using forefront beats and lyrics. A one woman guerrilla force reclaiming gritty urban music from r'n'b and hip hop annexation, she's letting her voice go where its meant to go. Her style is not for the candlelit basement. It's out there living in the real world of Gucci bags, Diesel underwear, high heels, breast implants, weed after school, cheating airhead honeys, runaway crushes, and the multiple complexities of male-female relations in the 2000s. Forget about torch themes from yesteryear. "I wasn't there, so I can't write that," says Amy. "I'm young, man, and I'm a city girl. I can only write about what I've gone through. I couldn't write something that I haven't been through, because its not fair and just the experience of having gone through it, that's the whole song. To me there's no point in doing a song unless it's a challenge in every area. I don't tend to do anything unless it's a challenge. That's why I started writing songs, really - to challenge myself."
Amy got her first guitar at 13. Her Brooklyn born, London raised mum was into folk and the natural thing was for Amy to start strumming an acoustic guitar. Carole King and James TaylorSarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington ("my dad always claimed he discovered her!"). Thanks to her grandmother, she was also imbibing a measure of Frank Sinatra. Like any inquisitive, talented city kid, she went through phases. There was a grunge phase. And a deviation into Hendrix. Her investigation of the boundaries of music received an interruption while attending the Sylvia Young stage school in North London. She was expelled for 'not applying herself' and wearing a nose piercing. A move to an all girls school in South London didn't help to endear the educational system to her, but it did accidentally further her technique as an instrumentalist. "I was like 'Where's the men, what is going on?'" she recalls. "So I used to lock myself away from the time of 15 and just do music, because I hated the school. Every lunch time every break I'd be up in the music room playing a guitar or piano." Having escaped the clutches of musical theatre and found a man-free place to explore her own interests as a player and vocalist, Amy started to investigate jazz more closely. The classic song 'standards' she'd known at stage school sounded stiff compared to the jazz versions. Moving through Ella to Dinah she felt her way forward though the old greats. Ella was "technically faultless" but Dinah "could do jazz, and then she could knock the shit out of a blues... when she was 12 she was directing the church choir! "I think it was the freeness of jazz that appealed to me," she says. "Not necessarily the avant garde - Coltrane, where he took that - but I could really relate to a simple trio. I could just hear it all in there, just drums, bass, a trumpet or piano, that's it for me. Four such simple elements, and brought together they would just fly. I just thought it was the purest form or real beautiful music. I think music now is very watered down and I think it's not even music, a lot of it."
At 16 Amy was well caught up in the rapture, studying the history and pushing her voice. Sunday morning gigs were coming her way and she was starting to appear with a Youth Jazz Orchestra. But at the same time, a broader musical osmosis from the urban sprawl was taking place. There was a flatmate into serious R'n'B - Jodeci and Jagged Edge. Inevitably hip hop leaked into her headphones, checking for Mos Def for his positive message and by extension making room for Talib Kweli, The Roots, Erykah Badu. For a while there was a boyfriend with a heavy reggae habit. Gradually, subconsciously, the smoking grooves, jazz enunciation and feisty attitude were coming together to form Amy's own thing. "The way it all gets mixed up though, that's just me trying to manifest what's in myself, in song," says Amy. "Its not a pretence, its just soul - stuff that has soul. It's like, I listened to Ray Charles for a year, just Ray Charles. He is such an inspiration. Musicians like that, and people like Roy Ayers, who'll go out and play a gig every night of his life still, because that's his life, they're the inspiration. I'd like to get to that point where I can just pick up my instrument and go out with this tonight, like pick up my trumpet and go."
With word around town about Amy's unique abilities getting louder she found herself a management company and started to work with producers. Island Records got to hear the works in progress and swiftly signed her to the label. Now Amy really could pick up her guitar and go. In London she worked with producer/writers, Felix Howard, Matt Rowe and Stefan Scarbek and Stateside got together with Commissioner Gordon and Salaam Remi. The debut album from Amy has not been force-fed. It has grown naturally out of her teenage passions, innate skills and on-going curiosity. Perhaps that's why it has such a healthy balance of old and new, smoky ballads and beats, summer and autumn. Its an album that fits as well alongside The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as it does Dinah's After Hours with Miss D. There are beats that lope and grooves that swing. A Wurlitzer organ swings low on a sorrowful lament. Smiling horn samples pull up in to the sunshine. There are interludes where flute and acoustic guitars take over. Then vinyl static from a sampled beat leads into a lazy groove. The bass lines get jiggy again. And consistently Amy 'knocks the shit' out of the songs, whether sultry, teasing, grieving or soulfully communing. "If you're coming from a place where you feel it naturally, it comes out," she says. "You don't even have to think 'I'm going to do this sexy', it just comes out. It's just a feeling that you can't even think, you just sing."
Crucially Amy's debut collection reveals a singer who can sing from the heart but also find light and shade in the city turbulence. There is mischief amongst Missy Amy's confessions. In Fuck Me Pumps (co-written with Salaam Remy) she pokes fun at "girls who genuinely think they have to go out and meet an athlete, and then their life will be perfect". I Heard Love Is Blind is a mock admission of love-cheating with a lookalike. close to the front deals with the three infatuations of Amy's life, starting of with her science teacher. And an update on the old standard Mr Magic finds Amy serenading a somewhat combustible, stress relieving, metaphorical 'lover'. On a straighter note, the album also catalogues her trials and tribulations in the jungle of love. What Is It About Men? is as hard on herself as it is about the un-fairer sex. Stronger Than MeTake the Box
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Bem comecemos pelo que talvez tenha sido um filme que gerou alguma controvérsia. Mysterious Skin (2004) é aquele filme ao jeito de Little Children (2006) bastante provocador. Mysterious skin desde já vos digo é um grande filme, boas interpretações, boa realização, bom guião que apesar de ser algo óbvio nos deixa presos para vermos o fim mas acima de tudo este filme é "nojento", no bom sentido, as cenas desde filme fazem-nos sentir desconfortáveis, incomodados, repugnados e todo o tipo de outras coisas más. Mas até é bom, porque era preciso mostrar esse lado para a história ficar completa. Mysterious Skin é uma história sobre duas crianças que foram abusadas por um pedófilo e da maneira diferente como ambas encararam essa realidade, por um lado o jovem que já se sentia atraído por homens e sentiu aquilo como um prolongamento da vida e do outro o jovem que apaga todas as memórias desses incidentes e passa 11 anos da vida a acreditar que tinha sido raptado por extraterrestres. Vejam vale a pena.
Realizado por Gregg Araki, interpretações de Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Lisa Long, Elisabeth Shue, Brady Corbet, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jeffrey Licon entre outros.
trailer feito por um fã...
Do outro lado da barricada está The Lookout (2007), certamente um filme muito menos polémico e mais de cinema, é um filme normal sem grande chatice uma história tipica. Um jovem jovem atleta promissor que numa noite foi responsável por um acidente rodoviário que vitimou dois amigos terminou uma relação e deixou-lhe mazelas. É assim que conhecemos Chris Pratt que agora tenta reeducar-se para viver uma vida normal, é assim que conhece Lewis funcionário cego de um callcenter com quem partilha um apartamento, é assim que um grupo de jovens tentam-se aproveitar das mazelas de Chris para assaltar um banco, é assim a nossa história.
O filme é bem realizado, e a premissa do filme é de certa forma melancólica, não achei o filme excepcional mas é um bom filme.
Realizado por Scott Frank, interpretações de Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher, entre outros.
eis o trailer
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Definiria este filme como uma Humor minimalista, porquê? porque primeiro é um filme calmo com desenvolvimento caótico (umas alturas lento outras rápido o suficiente), mas minimalista porque não usa grandes truques ou grande cenários muitas vezes o humor baseia-se em termos dois actores a olharem um para o outro durante largos segundos, diria ainda mais sobre o minimalista da maneira que as coisas vão acontecendo por cadeia ao nosso personagem principal. Devo dizer que realmente achei o filme engraçado, tem a sua história, o seu tipo de humor, o seu timing e ainda bem que o vi.
Mais especificamente sobre o filme, bem acompanhamos a vida de Ryan um escriturário/jornalista que logo desde muito cedo perde a namorada e é despedido do emprego mas que por um erro paranóico do pai arranja rapidamente outro emprego na santa casa, a caminho da entrevista ainda pára para ver uma baleia morta e é basicamente apartir daqui que tudo na sua vida muda, conhece uma rapariga e vira uma pessoa corrupta.
Bem eu gostei, aconselho-vos a ver.
Everything's Gone Green (2006)
Realizado por Paul Fox, escrito por Douglas Coupland com interpretações de Paulo Costanzo, Steph Song, JR Bourne, entre outros.