Humans, Chess and DVDs
This week 8 years ago, the humans lost the chess battle to Deep Blue. I netflixed “Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine” a great documentary on Kasparov’s Chess match with IBM (he lost, but they’ve yet to rematch) but noticed Netflix branded the DVD as well as watermarking the menu system. Is this a new way netflix will cut down on the “Netflix project” – an effort to copy of 25k DVDs. Or is Netflix Longtailing DVDs becomming a distributer for independent films? Photos of the DVD and menu here. IBM, how about open sourcing Deep Blue, it’s been 8 years. We’d love to do a DIY chess supercomputer for MAKE.
Might be neat to add this to an actual car PC…This custom mod gives your computer the personality of KITT, the computerized car from Knight Rider TV fame. It slides into a CD drive bay, and only has a single standard power connector. The project is a light display which imitates the dot in KITT’s hood. It looks like the scanning eye of the car’s computer that is so smart it has a personality and acts autonomously. Some people have said the computer shows more emotion and personality than the main actor, David Hasselhoff. 
Kempa.com has a great overview of video on vinyl and the history of getting videos on all sorts of discs. In fact, there was a ‘format war’ of sorts that broke out amongst companies encoding video onto grooved discs, well before the VHS / Beta wars were waged. CED’s appear to have been the dominant iteration of this technology, though I’ve found reference to a number of similarly imagined formats, including VHD videodisc system, Magnavision/DiscoVision, phonovid and y. 
Fireflies are networked nightlights for a local environment, the jars can be placed in different bedrooms or other spots around a home so people can communicate with one another through simply tapping on the jars. For example, if you tap the jar in your bedroom you will pulse the colored fireflies associated with that jar. The neighboring jars in your home will receive and pulse your taps, record them and then play them back. The neighboring jars can respond with their own tapping and broadcast themselves to the nightlights in the home. Pretty- here’s how to make them.