"In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day." Woah.

"Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize. Amazingly, Bertoni has deduced that this single movie is causing 15 percent of his remaining error rate; or to put it another way, if Bertoni could anticipate whether you’d like “Napoleon Dynamite” as accurately as he can for other movies, this feat alone would bring him 15 percent of the way to winning the $1 million prize."

Will Wright: "...the process of play is the process of pushing against reality, building a model, refining a model by looking at the results of looking at interacting with things.“ Jones: "That’s still the mission plan." Yes.

Moving away from modelling and into vast-scale collection; back to the ways of natural philosophy. Only this time: we really can collect enough *stuff*.

"...the same topic kept coming up, over and over... you can think of it as an amalgamation of crowd theory, human terrain mapping, and social simulation. It is the science of groups; it is a new kind of quantitative political science."

Ugh! Google release a cross-platform, free version of the awesome, awesome Sktechup. So cool. Want to gome and play with this NOW.

Awesome! From Make magazine 04