Bollywood @ kk.org

Kevin Kelly is one amazing man. I read his Cool Tools blog everyday and have found so many interesting products through there. However, he is so much more. He founded "Wired" magazine, for one thing. He also runs a whole bunch of other blogs and just seems to be getting so much accomplished!

Anway, back to my post. So I was reading this post on his Conceptual Trends and Current Topics blog and did a double take when I saw the sample picture used to illustrate the face swapping technology being discussed. Check it out and see if you recognize any of these faces :)

How does a lightning strike feel?

I personally don't know, but maybe this user from Flickr can answer that one for you. Here's her video -

Free song from Coldplay.com

Coldplay is giving away another free song. This one is called "Death will never conquer". It's free of cost, so go get it.

Looking under the hood of Google search

Amit Singhal of Google has a very interesting post explaining "Technologies behind Google ranking" over at the Official Google Blog.

It's quite eye opening about the myriad things that happen to make every Google search operation happen. Here's an excerpt -

"Synonyms are the foundation of our query understanding work. This is one of the hardest problems we are solving at Google. Though sometimes obvious to humans, it is an unsolved problem in automatic language processing. As a user, I don't want to think too much about what words I should use in my queries. Often I don't even know what the right words are. This is where our synonyms system comes into action. Our synonyms system can do sophisticated query modifications, e.g., it knows that the word 'Dr' in the query [Dr Zhivago] stands for Doctor whereas in [Rodeo Dr] it means Drive. A user looking for [back bumper repair] gets results about rear bumper repair. For [Ramstein ab], we automatically look for Ramstein Air Base; for the query query [b&b ab] we search for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta, Canada. We have developed this level of query understanding for almost one hundred different languages, which is what I am truly proud of."

House of cards - Radiohead's new video

So, Radiohead has a new video out and it's making waves because it doesn't use any cameras in the regular sense. Instead it uses some kind of 3-D scanner technology which uses lasers to create 3-D imagery.



That in itself would be pretty cool but they worked with Google (I don't know how Google does it but they get involved in all these neat things) to share a lot of the "making of" information. There's a web-based 3-D Viewer available that you can use to manipulate the video. Because its just data, you can see it at any angle. Very very cool! Check it out.

Hooray for Jay-Z

The man has a sense of humour. After widely reported disparaging remarks from Noel Gallagher about the hip-hop artiste headlining at Glastonbury this year, Jay-Z got back in his own classy way.

First, he included Noel G's comments in the video played before starting his set



And then he proceed to sing Oasis' Wonderwall! :)



LOL!

Also, he gave a stellar performance as well.

Good stuff!