An article in Nature reports on scientists who trained a deep-learning system with a large number of photographs of human retinas.  After training, the system was able to identify the sex of the people in the photos with >80% accuracy.  This is interesting because there is no known difference between male and female retinas.  Naturally the system can't tell us how it tells the difference.

via 52 Things I learned in 2022 via Kotke.org

Obit: John E. Karlin - Dialing Pioneer

The New York Times has the obituary of John Karlin who was involved in the development of the modern telephone numbering scheme.

iPhone Demo Video: WordLens

Lifehacker has a post with an amazing video of an iPhone app called WordLens.  The app, at least in the video, does real time translation of signs from Spanish to English.  The cool part is it preserves the font and colours of the original.

I have seen their free demo app that reverses text and it is very cool but sadly it only impresses geeks.

Google's Self Driving Car

The New York Times has an article with Google's experiments with self driving cars.  Their seven test cars have already driven over a thousand miles without human intervention.

Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided — more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption.

New Model of Raytheon Exoskeleton

Tech&Gadgets has a post about the latest version of the Raytheon Exoskeleton.  There is a video with a demonstration involving, for some reason, one of the actors from Iron Man 2.  It is looking very cool but is still tethered to a base station, presumably for power.

Control Panels

Dark Roasted Blend has another of their mega roundups. This one showcases control panels from various vehicles including fighter aircraft and the Hindenburg airship.

Computer Hardware Chart

Ever wondered what all of those connectors and sockets on your computer are? Well check out this page, it will probably have your answer.

First Flight of Full Sized Robot Helicopter

Wired has an article about a US Army test of a fully autonomous flight of a full sized helicopter.

While on-the-fly autonomous navigation is a first for a full-sized helicopter, the technology developed by Sanjiv Singh and his team from Carnegie Mellon is not so different from what they used to outfit a Chevy Tahoe to win Darpa’s 2007 Urban Challenge. “It’s not as if we started from scratch,” says Singh. “A lot of the technology was there already.”

Special Forces Powerline Tap

Here is a cool gadget. It is designed to let special forces teams tap into power lines to get electricity.

Steel Velcro

The New Scientist reports that German engineers have built what is essentially steel Velcro. The strips can support 35 tonnes parallel to the join or 7 tonnes perpendicular.

via Make

Display anywhere

This TED talk is a demo of an interesting new wearable computer technology. The computer hangs around your neck and has a projector that sends images forward. The computer detects the images and can adjust for where they are projected. For example you can use a wall as a display and manipulate the objects being displayed with your hands (the computer can follow the positions of your fingers). An other example near the end of the video is that if you draw a circle on your wrist the computer projects the time (onto your wrist).

I first saw this in an article in the National Post that was sent to me by email. The article was very irritating - especially given how cool the device is. Firstly they seem to think the sixth sense reference has something to do with the movie of the same name. Secondly, I was a bit shocked that someone who writes a pop and culture blog would insultingly refer to someone who develops new technologies as a nerd. Whether an MIT nerd is better than a non-MIT nerd I will leave as an exercise for the reader (assuming there are any).

Slashdot also linked to the video.