[From The Washington Post; for more, see a post in Discover magazine’s Science Not Fiction blog] Backyard astronomy and the weird future By Aaron Leitko, Monday, December 12, 2011 [snip] How I learned to stop worrying and love my virtual reality Chicago Humanities Festival Between smartphones that answer your casual questions and mass-multiplayer videogames, it’s getting more difficult to make a distinction between the real world and the one inside your laptop. But why worry about it? Go to www.chicagohumanities.org and watch William Gibson — who wrote the sci-fi classic “Neuromancer” and coined the term “cyberspace” — talking at the…

[From Cisco’s The Network] [Image from The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington: “Santa’s Video Conference Call to Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital Santa Claus says “Hello from the North Pole” to Jason Pratt, 4, via a video conference at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital, December 13, 2011. In reality Santa was holed up in a hospital conference room. Ryan Mathus, left, a systems engineer with Cisco Systems Inc., was a member of the team that wheeled the portable video-link setup into young patients’ rooms who would have had difficulty being transported from their rooms to visit Santa. Registered nurse Shannon Jackson is…

[From BBC News; additional information follows below] [Image: Actor Liam Neeson poses for a portrait prior to the press conference to announce the 2012 European Tour of Jeff Wayne’s musical version of War Of The Worlds New Generation (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)] Liam Neeson joins War of the Worlds musical as hologram By Tim Masters Entertainment and arts correspondent, BBC News 18 November 2011 Liam Neeson is to appear as a 3D hologram in a new version of Jeff Wayne’s long-running The War of the Worlds musical. The actor takes over the narrator role from Richard Burton, whose holographic…

[From JSOnline’s Art City blog; the post includes a 1:48 minute video] Lisa Frank’s wide open art cave By Karin Wolf, Art City contributor Dec. 16, 2011 If you have lived even a few decades, you know the excitement that comes with technological advances that change your assumptions about reality. Photographer Lisa Frank’s master’s thesis exhibition “<1>: “der” //Pattern for a Virtual Environment” takes viewers right through such a gateway to the future. To experience Frank’s wonder cave one must pass through three security clearance checkpoints and descend deep into the underbelly of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WID). After…

[From The Washington Post] “Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation,” by B. Coleman By Alex Shakar, Published: December 16 In his recent cri de coeur, “You Are Not a Gadget,” technologist Jaron Lanier laments the course the World Wide Web has taken in its second decade. Far from the early visions of cyberspace and jacking into virtual worlds without end, he tells us, we’ve been given a flat world of information, an airless zoo where we find ourselves in the cages. We reduce ourselves to “multiple-choice identities” on social networks and give away our precious content for nothing, to…

[From NPR, where the report includes audio and a transcript] [Image: Drone pilots are fighting a war from the safety of bases in the U.S., but are confronting some of the same wartime stresses as their comrades on the battlefield. Damian Dovarganes/AP.] Report: High Levels Of ‘Burnout’ In U.S. Drone Pilots by Rachel Martin December 19, 2011 Around 1,100 Air Force pilots fly remotely piloted aircraft – or drones. These planes soar over Iraq or Afghanistan but the pilots sit at military bases back in the United States. A new Pentagon study shows that almost 30 percent of drone pilots…

[From The Sydney Morning Herald, where the story features an additional 1:28 minute video report] Aussie lizard has smartphone game licked Asher Moses December 16, 2011 When Australian Philip Gith realised his pet lizard was a better smartphone gamer than him, he didn’t euthanise it for embarrassing him – he whipped out his camera. And now the female bearded dragon he calls Crunch has become an internet celebrity due to its fondness for the smartphone game Ant Smasher. In the video Crunch is shown snapping up the on-screen ants and insects with her tongue to the tune of the Super…

[A press release from UgroupMedia (.pdf); a 1:30 minute teaser and other videos are available here] Naughty or Nice? Watch What PNP’s Santa and His Elves Have to Say at: www.portablenorthpole.tv MONTREAL, QUEBEC, Dec 04, 2011 — Thanks to Santa’s elves, PNP-Portable North Pole is back online for its fourth year! Create and send a magical, free, personalized video from Santa Claus to anyone you want. Santa will dazzle children and entertain friends, parents, and colleagues. This year, Santa even has a brand new Elf Machine to help him answer this very important question – have you been Naughty or…

[A press release from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] “Virtual Operating Room” To Sharpen Surgeons’ Smarts and Skills Engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Awarded $2.7 Million NIH Grant To Develop Immersive, Touch-Sensitive Virtual Reality Tools To Replicate the High-Stress Environment of an Operating Room Published December 13, 2011 Even for highly trained physicians and surgeons, there’s no teacher like experience. This is the reason engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are working to develop a virtual reality operating room. Similar to how fledgling pilots train on flight simulators before ever leaving the ground in an aircraft, the virtual operating room will allow…

[From The Gadget Helpline blog, which includes a 0:46 minute video; other coverage indicates that the game included sound effects and that Google has now blocked use of Google Maps for the game] Creative Ad Agency Turns Google Maps Into First-Person-Shooter Game An act of genius – or genuinely disturbing? Posted by Jay December 13, 2011 Creative advertising agency Pool Worldwide utilised the immersive Google Maps location and tour guide with photographic Street View and provided its worldly travellers with a M4A1 assault rifle turning it into a first-person-shooter called Google Shoot View.…

[From The New York Times] Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers By Nick Wingfield Published: December 2, 2011 Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it? The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example. But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are…

[From the MIT Technology Review Hello World blog, where the post includes a 1:58 minute DigInfo TV video report] Elastic Electrical Cables for Robotic Skin The first-of-their-kind wires could take the hard edge off of robots. David Zax 12/06/2011 A Japanese company called Asahi Kasei has developed the world’s first elastic electrical cable — and has taken the liberty of christening it “Roboden” (here’s a link, if your Japanese is good). In a somewhat unsettling comparison, TechCrunch notes that Roboden can stretch by a factor of 1.5, “like the human skin.” The comparison (which Asahi Kasei actually makes itself) is…