GENOMICON

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.

Fooled me though.

That’s another thing Star-Trek didn’t predict – how incredibly creepy (some) robots would be.

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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.

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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.

Who’s actually a bit creepy tbh,in spite of the kindly old Boomer vibe. Looks a bit like this guy:

I think they want to do anthropomorphising – but you don’t do it like that. If it’s too close to an actual human, then a different set of circuits kicks in, and you get something closer to xenophobia.

It’s the Scary Clown factor. Having the back of his head missing with loads of wires visible doesn’t help – he needs some sort of comb-over. Or a hat. Or just a back of a head. Would it really have been that hard? Give the guy a head-back. It’s inhumane.

This is how you do empathy:

There are loads of them… but you get the idea.

It’s almost like our brains have to know that they’re “filling the gaps”… to know that it’s just playing. It’s non-verbal communication coming in via eyes I think. That’s where it goes wrong. Maybe they should give him some sunglasses.

Anthropomorphism is highly reflexive/instinctive I think, but if something is too close to “life” then I think instincts that are to do with revulsion to dead-things starts creeping in.

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Ok – probably won’t win any beauty contests… or any type of contest at all in fact, but it is pretty cool in that it’s… made out of stuff that’s kindof just lying about.

Obviously in the future there will be an entire class of robots/virii… that are basically just software, or software and some motors… that basically just “take over” a machine… or move into it like a hermit crab moves into a shell. It’d have to be some sort of AI of course… but that’s not impossible, surely. Bit of trial-and-error, innit.

The idea that intelligence must be locked inside a single body is hopelessly anthropomorphic… this is about as likely to wind up being the rule as the likelihood of software being limited to certain machines. Sure it happens at the level of drivers etc, but there are layers abstracted on top of that that are entirely free to be moved from host to host, and in some instances, move by themselves.

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I’m must confess to being a bit disappointed by hexapods – I thought they were going to take over the world at one point – mainly because of the hexapod router from about 3 years back

– and there was a minor rash of impressive debuts etc… but since then, they seem to have devolved into… “things that participate in dance competitions”.

Sign of the times I guess – that 3 years should be enough to get me all impatient etc. I mean I didn’t invent the wheel until I was about 6.

I think it might be an environmental thing though – although hexapods have the same number of legs as insects, they’re kindof facimilies, rather than being adaptations to a specific environment… so “the floor” is better suited to wheels… “outdoors, walls, trees” etc while suited to autonomous sets of legs, tends to favour legs that are in configurations where they’re not constantly getting tangled up in things.

There was a biomimetic video about the way robot hexapod legs should work a while back – TED I think… Can’t find it now, obviously – I think it was this one.

And speaking of which, you can now get kits for turning real live cockroaches into robots (ish)

Which personally, I think is cruel and insane – like remote-control via temporary lobotomy, but what do I know.

You can actually buy the cockroaches themselves via the link above, and there is a limit of two sets per order because they’re having trouble keeping up with demand. I do have a grudging kind of awe for what they’ve managed to do here – but I can’t be dealing with being cruel to animals – even if they are deadly enemies. If I saw this happening, the only thing I’d be able to think about would be “Get that thing off it, and let it go”

Because to me, everything in the whole world is basically a little person. Even rocks and stones are little people. They deserve respect etc.

Although this is ostensibly a tech blog, it is actually a blog about the 2nd Gutenberg Shift… which is part of the 1st Gutenberg Shift… and part of that is The New Atheism.

So this is about that.

I am strongly on the side of science… a native atheist, but I keep coming across people like this guy:

Who make it abundantly clear that some sort of recalibration is in order. So this is it.

This is my new position on atheism vs faith – which aims to be more inclusive, and… well… useful, basically.

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I have Principles, based on Empathy, Evidence and Art – in that order.

“Atheism” as a label is an empty vessel. Like being “Not and Astrologer”… that is not something worth living by.

As far as I can see, Belief and Faith are (non)cognitive strategies legitimised by tradition, but outside that context are indistinguishable from stupidity, except:

There are people who’s faith makes them far stronger on “Empathy and Art” than many atheists… they are far better people than many atheists. In this context, faith has value, and to dismiss it as stupidity is, in practical terms, a worse stupidity.

So let’s leave the stuff we disagree on for later… preferably until after we’re dead, and meantime, let’s do something with empathy and art – there are whole lifetimes worth of valuable and fun stuff to do here…

…with the overarching proviso: that we take the approach “Let’s see if this works”, and if it doesn’t, we reassess what we’re trying to do.

Amen.

K for Cool

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Apart (perhaps) from the German Ginger Catweasel… who seems to have a slightly French Accent, with a large dash of Scandinavian. Swiss then.

Seriously though, this is a really cool toy. Possibly steals a bit of the thunder from the Twine thing

THAT MADE OVER 1/2 A MILLION $ ON KICKSTARTER!!! even though it actually looks like a the sort of wax that you use to make skis go faster. The strength of Twine though is that it provides an interface a bit like an Email “Message-Rules” interface… which is actually a bit of a quantum-leap I think… and an application that would have a lot of traction in smartphones… because 5 years from now, there’s probably going to be quite a lot of them lying about not being used… and they have FAR more sensors and smarts than Twine, already built in, already with drivers, already working.

Speaking of which – I managed to sell over $1000 worth of Golden Mean Calipers in one day a couple of days ago… so am finally cracking and getting a smartphone. From no cellphone at all to $800 smartphone in a single bound. I kindof needed to anyway because I’d bought one of those little smartphone robots from Kickstarter…

Something I felt semi-obliged to do, even though I didn’t have a phone myself, because I’ve been predicting this would happen for the last couple of years.

The last thing I invested in in Kickstarter was the 3D Printing Filament From Recycled Bottles project… I just punted them a single dollar (they’d already made their goal) because I want to be kept up to date with how they get on. I’ve actually paid to be on a mailing list… although obviously the motivations are a little more complicated than that.

Back to the modular toy robot… although that’s really cool, when I say “Steals the thunder from Twine”… what I mean is “It doesn’t really”… because what Twine is, is a general-purpose device… so is therefore more configurable etc. One is really good for putting on a coffee table and playing with… kindof executive-toy-like… the other potentially has real-world applications. Additionally, the Modrobotic thing currently costs $160 for a minimum set… and the benefits of having more than one set multiply… so it’s possibly a bit expensoid to be hacking into real-world apps.

Interesting though. Kindof gives the lego concept a whole new dimension. When I was a kid we had a lego-like system made up of 1cm cubes that could click together (probably still got it somewhere). This is kindof like that, but each cube can actually do stuff.

This is Catweazle

ps: … ahhh… I knew those things looked familiar

Don’t know why, but this reminds me of the moon-landing. Something to do with frustration I think.

Fairly cool… “Avatar”, they call it – which is (heaven forfend) what it is. It’s a robot being controlled remotely via kinnect.

All the elements are in place, they’re just not terribly streamlined right now… but think on… imagine the possibilities of this process being very very streamlined… you wouldn’t have to be human for example. You wouldn’t have to be “there”. True, really, really big might be useful (in a slash and burn sort of way) but really, really small is probably where its headed. Personally I’m looking forward to back-yard safaris, where you get to fight spiders bigger than you are. Not that I’ve got anything against spiders mind. I’m just terrified of them.

Anyway, the cat seems compliant enough – probably quite heavily sedated etc… but the way its tail goes “flip, flip” generally means trouble. My cat wouldn’t put up with this. He’d go mental.

etc

Small Ted Talk

The thing that took my head off about this isn’t the printer that the talk was about… but the day-job one that can do detailed 3D prints the size of dust motes. I mean the other printer is impressive… but nanometer-scale resolution? That’s insane.

Not sure what you’d do with it mind. Make tiny rubiks cubes probably.

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Anyway – today is day 2 of 2012, year of the Mayan Rapture, which may or may not just be an ancient millenium bug. It would be kindof appropriate to do a retrospective of 2011, and a forecast of 2012, but I’m too hung-over and confused and I’ve been hiding under the bed for the last 2 days. 2011 was a busy year. Not for me… for everyone else. Shit happened. A lot of it. But not the Christian Rapture. Obama declared Martial Law though… oh… hang on… no, that’s yesterday. 2012 has started already – and it’s showing every sign of turning into a massive fight. The most disturbing video I’ve seen this year so far is this one where Cory Doctorow talks about the coming war on General Computing.

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You can tell it doesn’t really want to go – especially when it gets within sight of the river etc. Still… brilliant. Especially when he fixes it with a hammer. “tap tap tap” he goes. Every problem looks like a nail. Genius.

He makes walking book-cases as well.