There appears to be a whole community of people making these clocks… the plans are available (at a price) though I’m not sure that they’re CNCable – which is a pity because otherwise you could Ponoko them. (have I just used ponoko as a verb?)

My brother (who is a rocket scientist) occasionally makes things like these. I think they’re amazing.

I’m not sure what this one does – but it reminds me of Edward de Bono’s “Dog Excercising Machine” – except this one’s a “bloke with a red shirt and a moustache exercising machine” – which is even better than a dog exercising machine.

There are loads of these on youtube as well:

Thousands and thousands of hours of elaborate Rube Goldberg machines. There’s some obscure irony hiding somewhere in the fact that people are transferring time-wasting from TV watching to time-wasting making time-wasting machines that mark time.

Not that it is actually time-wasting of course. I think these are fucking brilliant – and playing is not a waste of time, it’s experimenting with boundries and reality and whatnot. It’s how we learn.

How many years ago now? Seven? Ten? I can’t remember how long ago it was… but I can remember being utterly gobsmacked… The Diamond Bullet Moment… when I first came across the website where someone had created a version of the programming language PERL in Latin.

The immediate question is Why (FFS)? But being a geek, I know the answer before I’ve even asked the question. If you’re a geek, when a puzzle is let loose in your brain, you have to solve it. You have to. You can’t help it. The reason Damian Conway did this probably wasn’t a million miles away from the reason I created a 70km wide web page here, although his was a far far bigger job… and it’s is brilliant for what it represents… someone doing something massive and massively random, just for the sake of it.

So anyway, somwhere between this, and Clay Shirky’s thing about cognitive surplus here…

…yet another revolution is underway. People are doing stuff. Lots of it.

People want to participate in their culture more than they want to sit back and be entertained (and advertised to). They’re making stuff and putting it up on the internet and they’re not doing it for money, they’re doing it for attention – which makes for far more diverse and interesting output. And because it’s all going up on the internet, these things aren’t getting lost. They’re getting to cross-pollinate with other ideas.

It’s not just that copyright cartels are being sidelined, the entire culture has changed. Copying and mutating IS the culture now. Mind you, it probably always was. The 20th century was probably an aberation.

But I digress…

(you need to watch these two videos at the same time)

This blog is a collection of projects from the fringe.