PCMag dropped in on the House of Imagination exhibit at the Tribeca Film Festival and put together this report. This is the second year the festival did the exhibit and competition, which they call Storyscapes; it is all about how movies may evolve and become more interactive and more immersive. There were 5 finalists, and they put forward some amazing installations. I am sure it is no surprise to anyone that Oculus Rift is at the center of a lot of these development approaches. Thanks to IGN for the heads up on this one.
Eileen Gunn has an excellent article published in Smithsonian Magazine about the history and nature of Science Fiction’s relationship with science and discovery. Titled How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future, it is a thoughtful piece by an expert on the topic. It includes quotes from some of the best known authors in the field supporting or expanding on her points, and not all of those points are as comfortable as we might wish they were. I suspect this was commissioned as part of The Future Is Here Festival taking place next month at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.
Going to be in Washington, D.C. in May? Then you might want to attend the second annual The Future Is Here Festival at the Smithsonian on May 16th, 17th and 18th. Some of the speakers will include Patrick Stewart, Brian Greene, Adam Steltzner, George Takei, Stewart Brand, Sara Seager, Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, and The Mythbusters… and that’s just on one day! At the higher ticket levels the event also includes priority seating on Saturday night for the national premiere of X-Men: Days of Future Past at the National Museum of American History, and Patrick will be taking questions from the audience afterwards.
The Live DVD build CAE Linux is a complete engineering toolkit for designing, simulating, testing, and creating/printing your own projects. Everything in the build is free and open source software, allowing you to design your device, do multiphysics simulations to optimize it, and generate the code for building it with 3D printing & milling. You can also design and develop your own printed circuit boards, and microcontroller circuits for automation. Not only do you not need to pay for a license for any of this (because of the GNU/Creative Commons licensing it comes with), you don’t even have to install it on your computer; it all runs directly off the DVD, being a Live Disc. This is pretty much the most powerful open source engineering package I know of, if you have any interest in the design and creation of anything from toy cars to advanced robotics, do yourself a favor and check out this build. You can find the download here, although I recommend visiting their home page to learn all about it and see what kind of support resources are also available.
And you can learn how to do that in 20 minutes, by watching this excellent TED video by Josh Kaufman. If you are not already a major TED fan, you should check the project out. This is the way to help yourself become the best version of you that you can create; by learning how to learn, and grow, and develop. This particular lesson is only the tip of the iceberg.
If you are into science in any form, or any kind of educational software, Scientific Linux is your best choice. It is put together by the folks at Fermilab in collaboration with the team at CERN, and you would be hard pressed to find a better group of pure scientists on the planet. It has install distro’s, which is where the real power is; the packages you install will determine what all it can do. Right out of the box it comes with Apache installed and ready to run, like any good variant of Enterprise Linux, and it uses the openafs file system, making it fully compatible with most education and research facilities. To start with I recommend going for the Live CD or Live DVD, which you can run right off the disk, without touching your currently installed operating system. That will give you the opportunity to get familiar with the operating system before you decide to install it, as well as give you a collection of office, programming, internet, and multimedia software. If you have an older system you want to install it to, it has the option of using icewm as your desktop rather thane Gnome or KDE, which need a lot more RAM. It is built on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is an incredibly stable environment. And if you think it is missing some important software, one of the kinds of tool sets it has are things that allow you to install it, install whatever additional software packages you like, and then make your own Live CD, Live DVD, or boot-able memory stick from it, using things like revisor, livecd-tools, or liveusb-creator. The latest version, 6.5, was just released and is ready to be run.