GENOMICON

When I was a kid I used to live on this island that had hermit crabs… that were little miracles of design… when they withdrew into their shells, their legs would neatly interlock to seal the shell and present a flat surface to the outside world.

So anyway, now there is a shortage of shells for wild hermit crabs… apparently around 30% of crabs are living in shells that are too small. I find this incredibly sad for some reason… something from my past I guess.

Elizabeth Demray has created artificial shells using rapid-prototyping and built to ideal strength-to-weight ratios. They are non-biodegradable so won’t break, and can be passed from crab to crab over the generations.

That’s the good news. The possibly NSG news is that they’re based on Fascist Italian architecture which crabs may or may not actually like, and she talks about getting corporate sponsorship, so they have advertising on them.

At which point (in my most humble of opinions) they go from being art, to rubbish, albeit rubbish that is useful to crabs.

Here is the pristine version:

We’d have to make a hell of a lot of them of course. But we already make a hell of a lot of little plastic things that we chuck in the sea,

so maybe we could combine the two. Bottletops that sink, that crabs can live in.

I can’t help but feel we’re getting all of this the wrong way round, and maybe the answer to the lack of shells isn’t plastic alternatives, but more shellfish. Not that the crabs would mind of course, because the plastic ones (If I’ve got this right) are actually better than the calcium ones… and humans provide for better or worse, a huge number of other niche’s so why not this as well? A beach filled with plastic shells, plastic sand, the bluest of blue skys.

I shall ask Michelle from Naturally Crabby (which I went on about before, and is a great site I think… and is exactly what the internet is for) what she thinks.

update: Well what she said was that the houses don’t curl around enough… so crabs won’t be able to grip properly, and that they’ll probably pose the same hazard to other wildlife the plastic bottle caps do – and that’s not inconsiderable.

So there you go. We ain’t there yet. The curly thing is a technical issue… the hazard to wildlife one? Not so simple. There’s got to be some easy technical fix to that as well though I would have thought. I mean swallowing normal shells isn’t a hazard to wildlife… surely artificial shells can be equally as hazard-free.

Sooner or later I’m going to get some glasses like these:

And I’m going to blu-tac a webcam to the front of them (yes, this one), and plug it into the glasses so they work just like real glasses except everything will be a bit pixelly.

That would be cool. I might look like a bit of a twonklet, but I look a bit of a twonklet anyway… and I wouldn’t care because I’d use the technique in this tutorial here to basically edit out all the idiots in the world (also wearing these glasses).

Then I’ll wander about the place banging into people who aren’t really there etc.

Actually, there used to be this poster or something entitled “How to make yourself invisible”, and the picture was of a homeless person… kindof a guilt-poster type effect, a kind of irony of which is that in certain respects, if you’re homeless, you want to become invisible, so you won’t get hassled. Which is why I found the following video quite sad, even though it’s a pretty neat thing to make.

from

I think a homeless person living in this would become an instant hassle-magnet – both from the police and the other vermin that you’re forced to deal with. When I lived in Camden in London in the 90s, the people begging in the doorways up Parkway were charged “rent” by stanley-knife carrying scum who would take a percentage of their money.

The biggest problems people face are generally other people, and the closer you get to the bottom, the worse they become.

That’s what I want. Everything wifiified.

I want gadgets that can sit on my network when my laptop is away, keeping an eye on things.

For a while I’ve been tinkering (in my mind, always in my mind) with Arduino-hooked-up XBees… these:

(from www.faludi.com)

Which are as cheap as chips (expensive chips) and LadyAda goes on about them in tutorials etc over here.

Trouble is though (if I’ve got this right) they only talk to each other, so setting one up as a network device involves some other bit of kit that I don’t know about – which is probably dead simple, but I still don’t know about it.

Then I saw these…

(from Eye-Fi)

Which are appear to be about $100 – which is way too expensive, but which appear to be smaller… and which maybe behave as a network device… so it’s closer.

Why? Don’t know. But if everything is going to have a computer in it, then it needs to talk to something… and it can’t be my laptop, because it isn’t there 1/2 the time… for example, it would be quite cool to have one of these little cards in every single wall-point / light fitting to micro-manage electricity usage. Seriously – it would be so much easier to manage your myriad stand-bys, chargers, thermostats etc etc off from a single piece of web-enabled software than by going around trying to do it by hand.

In addition to that, if it was a bit of web-enabled software, then there are probably all sorts of crowd-sourcing ramifications etc. I’m sure that simply by knowing where the electricity is going, would go a long way towards stopping it going there.

I think this is a really neat idea:

from instructables.com

It’s a little power supply with rechargeable batteries, a solar panel, and a crank-handle for recharging.

I think I’ll have a go at making that – although I’ve had a bit of a tinker with solar cells recently, and they’re distressingly weak. I think there’s a lot more mileage to be gained from making devices more efficient than making solar cells more powerful. It always bugs me when people point to charts of our energy usage and make claims about “what we will need tomorrow”. We should just fucking use less. It’s not that hard. I think a major part of the problem is that people simply have no idea at any given time how much they’re using… or any way of putting that knowledge into context even if they did know. Which they don’t.

That’s why I think Graphical energy monitors are such a good idea, they’re just way too expensive at the moment. They should be free. They should be compulsory – I mean according to the centameter lot they knock a 1/4 off your power bill. What would that do to the doom-sayer’s graphs? It would fuck them up, that’s what. They’d have to get proper jobs.

Anyway, back to the Personal Power Plant thing, I think the way to go with this thing is make it a sort of open-source plug-in platform… so if you want you can plug a windmill into it, or some sort of thermo-thing… because although it may be snowing everywhere else in the world right now, where I am it’s so hot that the tar is melting out of the roads and flowing down the gutters. There’s a hell of a lot of energy blowing about the place for free all the time. We just aren’t bothering to collect it.

And as synchronicity… or me being slightly late to the party would have it, Bruce Stirling (A creature with whom I hold no small degree of respect) has started a new project, entitled “Imaginary Gadgets project”… which is to do with Gadgets which are Imaginary. Or sort of semi-imaginary, exhibit A being the Antikythera

a 2000 year old mystery computer object of Greek Origin… and someone actually manage to make a working one recently, which is no mean feat:

And it looks as though there are plans here, so if any ponoko gurus want to have a crack at it, here it is:

though I suspect there may be better versions than that out there somewhere. Who knows, maybe the guy who recreated it would be interested as well.

In my own defence etc… this machine is a working gadget – and maybe Bruce and I aren’t on entirely different pages here, because he does say “Mere “weirdness” is parochial. The “impossible” is trivial”… and ironically, the site that first alerted me to his new project, was also the site that alerted me to how irritating I find aesthetics trumping function… although I won’t say which entries here caught my eye in this regard… it was the one that was most popular, but it’s been knocked from its perch.

I think maybe one of the things I found irritating was all the gushing flickr-esque comments the general gist of which seemed to be “ooh, where can I buy one”. I think I find that passivity irritating… and as Bruce said in his third introductory sentence for his new project…

“If you don’t care to actively contribute to the Imaginary Gadgets project, you can stop reading right here.”

Ha ha. I love you Bruce. Excellent.

My brother accidently gave himself one of these for christmas…

A little baby planelet, which was actually fairly big, but dead simple and as cheap as chips albeit fairly expensive chips. It’s radio controlled etc. He was telling me about this guy he knows who put a gyroscope on his baseball cap and coupled it to a little camera on the plane so you can look around while you’re up there. You can look down and see yourself flying etc. Marvellous.

So that’s what I want for christmas (and not socks). I want one of those planes, with a camera like this on it:

via gizmag

Yes – it is bi-focal or whatever you call it. Stereoscopic… whatever, it has depth-perception because you use it with glasses like these:

via gizmag

And controlled with one of these. Mounted on some sort of hat so the camera follows your head movements. It would be better to get some sort of eyeball tracking thing, but I haven’t really looked into how to do that.

This would be mounted on one of these:

Which is a mind contol device which (by the looks) you could use to control a plane a hell of a lot easier than those knob things that RC planes usually have.

So there you go. That’s what I want. One of those… then just give me a way of crapping on cars and I’d be the happiest guy in the world.