So many other people have gone on about this already that it seems kindof redundant… still, as I appear to be charting the progress of these things, here it is.
It’s like space-invaders come to life.
I’d be interested to know whether they’re truly autonomous, or whether they’re being controlled by the room – there seems to be a fair few sensors round the walls… which would suggest to me that this isn’t true swarm behaviour… it’s more like a multi-bodied single organism. Like The Borg.
If you look for long enough, you will find yourself. Are you happy? Hard to say. Are you?
They seem very single-minded these people… going about their business etc. I wish I had their… drive. Their get up and go… although I’m guessing a lot of them are like tiny Stepford Wives.
The weird thing about this, is that it looks completely normal and natural. It looks like the way things “should be”. I wonder if we’ll ever get it together. I hope so.
It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s art. This is what science fiction should look like. Actually it’s what science looks like.
I wrote my own rss feed aggregator a year or so ago – it looks a bit like the way Opera renders RSS… which was almost certainly also the inspiration for pinterest I think, which itself has a shitload of clones now… in fact there’s an EU company that’s apparently worth about $200m – and it’s main tactic is to take applications that are foolishly only available to the US market, then clone them, build up a user-base, then sell them to the original companies.
But I digress… I have a hand-coded feed a bit like pinterest, but with 3 columns – and it’s basically science fiction now. Real, but still sci-fi. Kindof. The Sci Fi singularity is almost on us. It’d be fucking cool… if we could just get rid of the fascists.
I’m quite interested in this… in a tangential sort of way, because CNC fabbing makes “showpieces of skill” from yesteryear, downloadable and printable… for example $20,000 antique wooden watches from Russia
Could probably be designed in a CAD system, and fed to a CNC machine. Especially now gaps are being filled… hardware problems are being solved as software problems, eg: this online cog generator:
Which is not to say that Piers Secunda’s puzzle is part of this process – it is (I think) good old fashioned skill, honed over many years. But it’s only a matter of time.
I remember reading somewhere that you could theoretically recapture the sounds of ancient Ethiopia by getting an old Ethiopian pot and rotating it with an ancient Ethiopian’s finger retracing the movements the original one made when it was on the potter’s wheel… like a wheel-thrown pot could act like a giant wax cylinder.
This is like that. Is it? No. Not really. Oh well.
Cool though, in a 70s/60s paleo-non-futuristic sort of way.
Well, my latest kickstarter “investment” looks set to be a record-breaker.
At 8am this morning I received their first update email… which said “Woohoo! We made our target!”… 5 hours later, they’ve doubled it… and they have 30 days to go.
So far on kickstarter I have funded:
1) extruded Aluminum rollers – for CNC machines and Camera Sliders
2) a smartphone controlled robot
3) a universal smartphone to tripod attachment
4) a recycle plastic to make feedstock for 3D printers machine
5) a floating ecosystem/machine to create biofuels
6) open source, web-based video-editing software.
7) indestructable, modular earbuds
On indiegogo I also punted $100 to Jeniferever
I’ve also punted money to Wikileaks, and The Real News Network. I think that covers it. If America decides to <airquotes>call</airquotes> wikileaks a terrorist organisation, than I have materially aided terrorism and can be deported/imprisoned etc… but then so can a lot of people, and really, the only way out of this one is for everyone to go into Spartacus mode… everyone donate.
Still… two of the things I’ve donated to in the list above were just $1 – because I think they’re interesting projects and want to be kept on the mailing list. Of the things where I’ve pre-ordered… the only thing that’s turned up is a T-Shirt from Jeniferever… which is fair enough, since I gave them $100 and it was me that suggested they go on indiegogo in the first place.
As to the others? The roller-bearings should have been here ages ago. I’ve talked the bloke… apparently as I’m a donor, I should jump to the top of the queue…. still… vaiting vaiting vaiting. In the time that it’s taken this thing not to turn up, someone else (who did apparently get what they asked for) has made an entire 3D printer.
I’m not impressed with turnaround times… even if these things are still in development. I can remember when the standard mail-order delivery time was 28 days. Every magazine that had adverts for mail-order had 28 days as a standard policy. Amazon.com kicked that one right out the window. Now it’s A-fucking-SAP. I’ve ordered things off Amazon UK and had them turn up in the letterbox the next day. For my own mail-order stuff, I try to get them out the door same day that the order comes in. I find it really stressful having to wait 10 days for parts to turn up (If I’ve run out). It looks to me as though crowd-sourced funding could do with the same kick up the arse that Amazon gave mail-order. I know development takes time, but it doesn’t take that much time.
So… Kickstarter. Not a good way to do your shopping.
In terms of investment? If they make this helicopter, then the whole thing is worth every penny… in fact if any of these things come off then it’s worth every penny… but particularly the helicopter.
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ps: And Kickstarter STILL doesn’t have an RSS feed even though I’ve told them twice that they need one – and their navigation is kindof crap… all about “staff recommendations” and “popular”. I’m not interested in “staff recommendations” or “popular”. I’m only interested in every single new thing that turns up, preferably filterable by category, and I don’t want to have to manually revisit their site looking for updates. That’s last-fucking century – so instead of finding new things through their site, I’m reliant on other people’s blogs, and twitter.
So that’s today’s complaining out of the way.
edit:
So it looks like the reason that Kickstarter pulled this project is not (as I’d thought) that they took fright at the legalities, but because the people involved were quite possibly bullshit-artists.
Which is a shame. Still. There you go. The excoriating eye of the internet is a tough one to fool once it’s got you in its sights.
It’s like iRobot as imagined by David Lynch. Almost supernaturally creepy… and I’m sure this isn’t deliberate… and I still can’t quite put my finger on what the psychological origins of this creepiness is. I mean the Alien off Alien was made up of about 5 well-known human phobias rolled into one… but this? Don’t know. There’s something clingy and parasitic about it. Weird.
Which is a car roof that has solar panels by day, and lights up inside at night… oled screens etc that change according to ambient light conditions.
But who cares about that? This is a totally cool design – and a classic example of what you can do when you get computer-controlled machines to do the fabricating.
The photograph is taken from the point of view of… I don’t know… a cat probably.
There isn’t much on the BASF website… apart from a classic example of what will come to be known as Early 21st Century pre-World War III, Fascist Design. You know the sort of thing.
I don’t know why they’re always doing that. People in suits, tinted blue… but at least you can see them coming. The really insidious stuff has people who are full of… “life”… like the ones in coca cola or beneton adverts.
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