As I start blogging again (!), one of the things I’ll be mentioning regularly are algorithms. Computation is one of the driving force of many changes in society today but the word itself, the creation of, the uses and impacts of algorithms are often hard to grasp. Here’s a “mundane” usage yet extraordinary technically example, researchers at Microsoft have created software which takes first-person video and speeds it up—common enough—but also smooths out the result dramatically.