GENOMICON

This has been causing ripples recently – a beautiful paper castle from Japan

Which seems like a good excuse to cruise about the place seeing what else has turned up in the wonderful world of converting 2D paper to 3D stuff.

This is cool – albeit several years old cool. Robert Lang talking about a quantum leap that’s recently been made in origami – general guidelines on how to make just about anything with origami, with a bit of software on his site to make it all easier for people… software as democratisation instrument. It also touches on one of my favorite notions… that perspective is worth 80 pts of IQ – one man’s daft-idea is another man’s space-technology or medical life-saver. We’ve seen this with bristlebots (see prev links etc)

As Robert says… a means of transmitting information with heredity and selection… and we know where that leads.

There’s an aspect of machine-evolution here… the Vicarious Lamarkianism – what it means is that one memetic-genealogy can poach ideas from another completely unrelated genealogy to produce massive quantum leaps.

Anyway, back to the paper-sculpture memepool

from Elsa Mora

from Julia Brodskaya, who is my favorite, but who does what artist sites always do, and that’s make the pictures too small.

from Richard Sweeny

from Flymissy

from Jennie Nayton

from Ingrid Siliakus

I’ve been waiting for an excuse to go on about this again for a while now… and in that time it seems to have exploded in a whole variety of different directions. I find it utterly amazing to be honest. Restores my faith in human inventiveness.

This is cool – a wind-powered knitting machine.

from Merel Karhof (video here). It actually looks quite fast.

I feel slightly unsettled that I can tell just from the building not only that it’s London, but that it’s somewhere in West London. Not the sort of place you’d imagine would have a wind-powered knitting machine, but there you go.

The idea is that it merrily spins away making scarves, and every so often you harvest a bit of it. Reminds me of the self-knitting lampshade that I went on about earlier:

From Italy, viaboing boing

Anything inflatable is automatically great. This one’s also quite cool because you can use the bike to pump up the pontoon things. The propeller doesn’t look terribly… optimised though.

I wonder if instead of having a bike, you could use a rowing-machine. Nah. That would be silly.

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Much as I hate vapourware – it makes me feel tired. Depressed. Overwhelmed by the bullshit of a million well-meaning, attention-clamouring-for liars… well, it appears that Segway inventor Dean Kamen has filed a patent for… putting a Stirling engine in an electric-scooter. It isn’t a photo… or even one of those CGI pictures that are presented as real products on greeny blogs, just a drawing… but apparently he’s thrown a lot of money at it, so maybe it will actually happen.

Anyway – an on-board stirling engine means it can burn pretty much anything to keep the battery topped up (the engine isn’t strong enough to drive a whole motorbike)… although where I come from, “burning anything” means one thing: plastic cups. The originating article also talks about a war-bot that can eat leaves to power itself. A vegetarian then. Seems unlikely. Why can’t it eat people’s brains and drink their blood etc? I don’t understand it.

I actually quite like the idea of stirling engines though – there’s a company in New Zealand that makes a washing-machine sized thing that produces heat and electricity – and I seem to recall various large-scale solar things popping up round the place as well.

So hopefully this will go a little further than the Segway itself, which was a solution to a problem that no one actually had, and which cost about $50,000 or whatever it was. Pity he’s patented it though – basically putting a choke on innovation by other people.

“Instantly transform your iPhone or iPod touch into an air mouse, trackpad, and wireless remote for your computer! Sit back and surf the web, browse your photo library or control your music player from the comfort of your couch. Our air mouse uses the built in accelerometer to translate your hand motions into mouse movements on your screen. It can also operate as a trackpad, allowing you to control your computer with a single finger. Suddenly your iPhone has become an essential part of any home theater PC and a presenter’s best friend. Using an innovative application notification system, the iPhone will always know what applications are running at any time and show the appropriate keys for that program, providing you with a single screen for controlling ALL your media and web applications.” – http://mobileairmouse.com

WAAI – Waving Arms About Interface, as popularized by Minority Report with Tom Cruise (who is a bit ferrety if you ask me) was taken to a whole new level before Minority Report even came out by this little gem from Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas (who’s also fairly annoying).

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Someone has <airquotes>imagineered</airquotes> the most hasslesome file-retrieval system in the (reasonable) universe – where you don’t only have to wave your arms around, you actually have to walk about, just like you’d have to do if computers weren’t actually invented and everything was still on bits of paper, and you were a filing clerk from the 70s.

There should be a word for this – Morphological-Mud-Stickery… where the design of a new system is based upon the design of the system it replaced… like designing a vacuum cleaner so it looks a bit like a broom… or a horseless carriage, so it looks like a horseless carriage.

WAAI will be good for games (in fact it already is). Wandering about inside a virtual environment will be great for games. Anything else? Forget it. Pain in the arse.

Dante Bucci – Fanfare. Amazing.

I think these are quite cool

Little camp stoves made from empty beer cans, or coke cans, depending on whether you drink beer or coke.

There are a bunch of these on Instructables, and numerous youtube examples and variants… but the powerhouse seems to be this guy

who sells them off his website.

His name is Tinny. He’s from the future.

He’s made an appropriate technology that can be put together anywhere on the planet… he’s done the whole open-source thing – the “design” is there for anyone to use for free, and he even shows people how to make them themselves (in fact there’s a video of him making one in 3 minutes on his site), but his business is selling the actual physical product (and satellite items). He’s retired, has a massive youtube channel which he uses for chatting and customer support… offers advice on hiking and safety etc… his video channel has videos of his cat…

I really like the way there’s no delineation between life and work and play… it’s all the same thing. In addition to this, the process is the product. The whole life-cycle is there for anyone to see. No secrets. No SEO. No $30,000 site makeovers and Web-2.0 consultancy.

I’d buy one of these just because I like the guy. This is good advertising. There’s no deception or clever marketing techniques – it’s just someone being himself, doing something that he’s good at and likes doing.

So there you go. Here’s a wood-burning variant, with a little electric fan

And an incredibly small one.

Well, obviously it started with this:

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An alarm clock of sorts.

And then there was this

A magleved table. (ermmm… why?)

Which kindof morphed into this:

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and

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None of which is really my cup of tea. Apart possibly for the table, though it seems to be going to quite extreme lengths to solve a problem I don’t actually have… or at least don’t really understand.

So. Pebbles. These are cool.

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Marvelous. That’s what I want my camper van to look like.

Reminds me of the ice hotel thing up in Sweden…

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Which is so cool, I can hardly stand it, even though it is from 2006. Was designed by an Australian apparently – there’s a PDF (which is the document format of the devil) of the construction etc on his site.

I don’t care what this grows up to be, it’s cool

A neat developmental photograph thing as well