YouTube Now Offering 2160p 4K Video Resolution

Around this time last year I published a post describing YouTube’s then-new 3D video player option.

This year, they’ve stepped up their game in a big way.

Earlier this week (on Monday, April 7, 2014), while holding a regular tech chat/meeting in my office with my UC Berkeley colleague Lars Føleide (who is also my company‘s Philanthropy Chair) we noticed something new.

YouTube is now offering 2160p 4K resolution (along with 1440p HD) video resolution:

4K mainstream, here we come…

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Bill Nye to USA: We Need More Engineers

A good friend of mine, Dil, caught me off guard the other day by asking me, “are you watching the debate?” I thought immediately to myself, “the debate?.. it must be something epic.” It was something epic.

Bill Nye (on behalf of science) faces off with Ken Ham (on behalf of genesis, i.e., religious beliefs about human origins) – the entire debate is a back-n-forth over these two viewpoints on ‘where we come from’ –  in an ultimate two and a half hour debate.

In this excellent debate broadcasted live earlier this week (broadcast date: February 4th, 2014), my favorite spoken thought came from Bill Nye, at the 1:49:26 mark, where he says:

“…we need scientists and especially engineers for the future. Engineers use science to solve problems and make things. We need these people so that the united states can continue to innovate and continue to be a world leader. We need innovation and that needs science education.”

Check out the video yourself on YouTube and it will likely also remain embedded on the debatelive.org homepage for some time.

Emoticons Deceiving Mobile Users

I only bring it up because when you look closely you can notice some major differences between what I think I am sending and what is actually sent (who knows what it looks like on the other end…), defeating the intrinsic meaning of the emoticon and thus they message being conveyed itself…

MRI Neural Brain Map Overlay on Human Brain Label Diagram

Studying a little neuroscience tonight. Neural networks of various types play the most crucial role in classifying information, used in my company’s trading software. Normally, I just get to look at the algorithms and other scientists’ work/attempts to quantify the way our brain processing information into various programmable languages, like C++, C#, and Python. Tonight, I chose to read a textbook on the subject and it is beyond fascinating to learn about the complexity behind the systems in the human body (especially the brain). Apparently, the human brain weighs three pounds and has over 100 billion neurons.

I decided to open my laptop and find a good diagram labeling the various parts of the brain – to have visible in the background (as I continued reading). Found one quickly, then, I got experimental and created an overlay of one of Van Weeden, et al.’s MRI images. It is transparent and with very little rotation fits nearly perfect on the diagram.

It cannot be helped to love looking at the human brain in its full complexity (in this case, adding some dimension an old useful diagram)!

YouTube has 3D Option for Select Videos – I never knew…

First time I have seen this was today (while checking out the AngelHack Hackathon site).

Usually, I do not see this feature while watching videos at YouTube.com–pretty neat!

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Update 1: When I when back and refreshed the ‘3D’ option went missing… I am not sure if this was because YouTube is only randomly (and selectively) offering the feature to 3D-compatible videos… or, if it was because I had too many additional apps (using memory) the second time I went back (after I refreshed the page). Supposedly, the latter is the more likely.

Update 2: Revisiting today (5-4-13), I toggled the video resolution to 1080p HD. Only after this, the ‘3D’ option would then appear. Apparently, you must put the embedded player into an 1080p HD mode (by clicking the ‘gear’ icon in the lower-right). Possibly, the 3D icon/option becomes visible when the embedded player is in any HD setting, e.g. 720p.

 

Two of the Best Web Apps I’ve Ever Seen — leveraging HTML5 and JS

 

Two of my all-time favorite interactive (and most user-friendly) web apps were discovered both this week…

 

First honors (but just barely) would have to go to thedevs behind famo.us. Using only JavaScript and HTML5, they have taken the growing physics-driven web apps to an entirely new level. As one Forbes.com article puts it,

“…the company’s HTML5 development platform that incorporates a fully featured physics engine into its revolutionary surface rendering engine. And all of it is pure HTML5 and JavaScript. No plugins. No third-party libraries. Just unbreakable 60 frames per second animation of hundreds of 3D surfaces with physics. And Famo.us allows an app to do all of these things with the content itself. In developer-speak, these are manipulations of objects in the DOM (document object model), the core method of representing content on the web.”

 

famo.us:

Famo.us Peek 1

Famo.us Peek 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a close finish for second-place, a web app which shares information in a way that is not only interactive and fun, but also very design-savvy.

 

Vienna, Austria:

Interactive Vienna Website Preview