Crave

In the future panopticon society of all-seeing robots, don't count on expressing your loyalty to our metal masters with a halfhearted grin.

MIT boffins have already trained computers to recognize real smiles of delight from smiles borne out of frustration. And natch, they can already do it better than us lowly meatsacks.

The list of installations for next month's Beam electronic and analog music festival in West London has brought a playful and mysterious piece of art to our attention -- a surprising cocktail of high and low tech.

Sound artist Mike Blow is on the Beam bill, and his recent piece "Torch Song" combines a microphone-and-laptop setup with light sensors to create a control panel that lets its user "play" a building -- using flashlights.

John Gottula is a patient man. His proposal to girlfriend Kelly Voll took more than six months. No, this wasn't the slowest knee-lowering in history. It was a carefully hatched horticultural plot.

When it comes to geek love, we've come across proposals involving Super Mario, iPhone apps, "Back to the Future," and Twitter. Gottula, a graduate research assistant in plant pathology and plant-microbe biology at Cornell University, turned to his science background in horticulture for inspiration.

"I've heard of men proposing by hiring a pilot and popping the question with a banner. That's expensive; plus I don't have a flair for aeronautics," Gottula tells Crave. "Planting flowers to spell out a proposal seemed more like a horticultural way of doing it."

Fresh leaks indicate that Sprint and LG are poised to deliver one of the first Android 4.0 smartphones with a sliding QWERTY keyboard. In addition to its few preliminary specifications, BriefMobile has also obtained the first glimpse of the new LS860 handset.

There's not a lot to say here, except that this lens, with its effective focal length of 150mm on the Micro Four Thirds system and a fast aperture of f1.8, sounds like a great addition to the pool of MFT lenses.

Olympus doesn't currently have any fast telephotos in its MFT lineup -- just some really clunky, slow zooms, and Panasonic's best equivalent only goes as low as f2.8 (for about the same $899.99 price). Olympus' 45mm f1.8 is one of my favorite MFT lenses, and this looks pretty similar. I can't wait to give it a shot, so to speak.

We're no economists here at Low Latency (and quite frankly we don't really understand the stock market), but if we could afford to invest in Facebook we'd certainly be upset about its 18-percent drop on day one. It's been falling steadily for a few days and the talk of Facebook's valuation being totally out of whack is now commonplace.

How ironic is it that a site that lets people mislead others about who they really are has its own identity crisis on Wall Street?

Despite the late Steve Jobs' mockery of a stylus, Apple has been tinkering with the notion of an iPen complete with haptic feedback.

That's according to a newly published patent application unearthed by enthusiast site Patently Apple. Apple's idea for an iPen would include haptic feedback to improve the user interface.

Users would feel a small vibration depending on how much pressure they applied to the stylus, or whether the stylus moved over a link on the screen, creating a more realistic experience. It could also vary depending on the angle of the stylus, orientation to the screen, more

Big-screen OLED TV technology has taken years to come to market, and LG's 55EM9600 won CNET's Best of CES award in January, so among technology enthusiasts, it's safe to classify anticipation for the 4mm-thin television as "high."

CNET's Asia's TV reviewer Philip Wong got the opportunity to spend some hands-on time with an early version of the set yesterday in Monaco, and he liked what he saw -- from deep black levels to superb off-angle viewing, with a potential for accurate color. His conclusion?

In many ways, the 55EM9600 is the "spiritual successor" to the lengendary Pioneer Kuro. Until we have a chance to check out the Samsung OLED panel, this LG easily sets the new benchmark in terms of TV picture quality and slim design.

Check out his full impressions here, including plenty of in-person pictures and TV nerd eye candy.

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Come this June, you'll finally be able to use your languishing Leica lenses on the Fujifilm X-Pro1 -- or at least expand on Fujifilm's small collection of lenses.

The new M-Mount Adapter will cost $199.99 and seems to provide full compatibility, including support for the camera's viewfinder framing corrections. Via the camera's Mount Adapter Settings you'll be able to create profiles for up to six lenses with corrections for distortion, peripheral illumination, and color shading across the frame.

It sounds well-built -- aluminum mount on the body side, stainless steel on the lens side, connected by aluminum.