GENOMICON

Another bunch of stuff. I’m having difficulty keeping my shit together of late. I always think these things are cop-outs etc – but they generally take longer to put together than normal blog-posts, so you can stop your moaning.

Anyway, the week that was:

1) How to make glow in the dark stuff

“WARNING” It says (in a voice like a droid), “This procedure should only be performed by, or under the supervision of, an experienced chemist”.

Is that the sort of thing I should be doing? Yes, I think it is. This is exactly the sort of thing I should be doing.

Although in today’s wack-job paranoid world you’d probably find yourself trying to explain how it wasn’t a drugs lab to some spotty 14 year old policeman with a moustache. You’d get your stuff back after 6 months of hassle, but you’d be “flagged”. Put on a database, and for the rest of your life you’d hear funny clicking sounds whenever you picked up the phone.

2) Aviary have made all their stuff free

I like Aviary – never use their stuff mind, but in principle… I like them. I went on about them last year I think.

When web-companies suddenly release all their content for free, it generally means that the subscription model has failed, and that they’re going to try advertising. Aviary claims that the subscription model hasn’t failed, and that they’re just doing this because they’ve got a load of venture capital – which may be true. I mean the VC bit is almost certainly true… but… the subscription model bit? Partly true I’d say.

3) Crowd-sourced funding for stuff

Indiegogo – which is a much-needed alternative to that other one which is US-only. It seems that people mainly want movies funded.

Which is sortof interesting – because I was reading this thing the other day in which the Jumping-On-And-Off-The-Treadmills band was bitching about EMI not letting them repeat the thing that made them successful in the first place… but at the end they said that the role Record Companies used to play was as Risk Aggregators – and I can’t fault the writer on this. They did… and even though the other problems that record companies used to solve no longer exist, this one still does. We still need risk-aggregation I think… but we’ll have a far richer and more inclusive culture, if we can crowd-source this… than if we have…

… well, Daryl Hannah said it best “What’s the greatest threat to film-making today?

The same as always: the fact that there’s a bunch of guys in charge, with sometimes questionable tastes, who dictate what gets seen.”

4) Google Goggles

The most convincing (in fact possibly only convincing) description of augmented reality I’ve seen so far

The same article had a thing with real-time voice->voice language translation… which is pretty impressive.

5) Kids spied on by schools through remote-controlled webcams on their laptops

I have mixed feelings about this one…

a) What is it with hierarchy these days? Are they fucking insane? Why is it that every single time I read the internets (or even turn on the TV news) there’s some example of top-down control completely over-shooting the bounds of what any sane person would regard as acceptable?

I mean how do you get to the point where you think it’s acceptable to do this?

b) My mum and dad are teachers. Most of their friends are teachers. I spent my childhood surrounded by teachers – and I can’t imagine any of them actually having the time, let alone the will to do this.

Then again, some of the teachers that taught at schools I went to were total cunts and should never have been allowed near children at all. They weren’t child molesters… they were just violent, blinkered disciplinarians.

6) Laser-Cutting is a lot more expensive than I thought it was… and I can’t really afford to experiment with this stuff (that much) any more.

7) Bloom Boxes – Looks like Bollocks to me.

Or just incredibly bad reporting.

People seem to be falling all over themselves to sing the praises of this science-free innovation… which costs about a million dollars per unit, and still needs gas as an input.

“Gas”? Any kind of gas? Yep, Apparently any kind of gas. Well I guess that’s good but… what if you haven’t got any gas?

There are some fairly major-profile names behind it, but I have my doubts. It follows the Bullshit Template to the letter. Apart from the major-profile names.

8) Chatroulette?

Well I don’t have a webcam and I suspect that the internet is too slow in New Zealand to actually use it.

But there’s been a load of excitement and hype etc, so it would be remiss to leave it out… and according to this, it looks like fun.

I’ll ask twitter if anyone’s managed to use it.

9) Android Controlled Lego Thing

I can’t believe that Lego nearly went bust recently – and my Brother pointed out the range of toys that brought it back from the brink… and they’re kindof pre-made-transformer type things which… um… kindof seem to me as though they require (or invite) less imagination than common or garden lego.

Lego is one of those things that if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. And we would. If lego does go bust (and I sincerely hope it doesn’t) people will start making their own – if not immediately, then within the decade.

In a scatty sort of mood today. Can’t concentrate. It’s too hot. I don’t know where I am. In about 2 hours, I’m going to go down to see this band that I’ve almost starting playing with and tell them I don’t want to play guitar, and I want to make a movie instead.

In the meantime… how’s the Second Guttenburg Shift coming along?

1) Where’s all the Science Fiction I was promised?

Oh Cool! it’s a… it’s a…

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! NOT ANOTHER DISHWASHER!!!

In the future, everything will be designed so it looks like something even further into the future, even though it’s not really. The Packaging Goes Deep man, The Packaging Goes Deep.

But it’s a very… singular vision of what futuristic design is actually like. It’s all blue-LEDs and streamlined shapes and see-through bits. When was the last time you saw a (new) sci-fi movie that didn’t have transparent computer screens?

Now we’re making them, and as far as I can see, the ONLY reason for this is that they’ve appeared in so many sci-fi movies. I mean a laptop where you can see through the windows doesn’t actually make it easier or better to use. Does it? It would be quite cool though. I’d get one.

This is what Sci Fi looked like 40 years ago

They actually use slide-rules in this series… because they hadn’t thought of calculators. Ten years after this was made, I bought a calculator on a watch in Hong Kong.

I mean it’s rapid rapid rapid, although for some reason (maybe because it’s so close) it seems achingly slow… but if you look at old sci-fi, a lot of the design ethics have carried through. It’s like the technology has advanced rapidly, but our future tastes have kindof stayed the sameish.

Apple bear a lot of responsibility for this – they bought the retro see-through thing back with a bit of a bang. But never mind about that, here’s some steampunk mice

2) Dude Climbing up Wall a bit like that thing off Spider Man

3) Printing in Clay

I find this one interesting because of the historical echo – the process of 3D printing is essentially the same as coil-pot making… only with much higher resolution – and the ability to make pots was one of our earliest (and therefore most important) innovations. The ability to store food/seeds meant we could stop being nomadic. Agriculture is probably the biggest/most profound innovation that humanity has ever accomplished. Everything changes when you invent agriculture. Your gods change.

4) Robots that make robots. Completely.

Cool! We don’t have to outsource labour to the 3rd World anymore.

Is there still a 3rd World? Seems like kindof an 80s concept. There are slave-cultures, crime-cultures, islands of stability, bubbles of… cancerous excess – but I’m getting the distinct vibe that everything’s gone a bit transnational.

On TV the other night were two quite good programs – Breaking Bad, and Hung. One is about a teacher who decides to become a drug dealer, the other is about a teacher who decides to become a prostitute.

As entertainment it’s not bad… it seems… realistic. These decisions almost seem like positive steps – unusual second jobs… people self-improving etc… rather than a society that the bottom has fallen out of. All this wailing of late about rates of unemployment… unemployment isn’t the problem. Cost of living is the problem. The market has driven wages down and prices up to the point where people are only just surviving.

Still robots. Cool!

5) Verizon allows Skype on Smarphones

There isn’t an iPhone app for that.

The battle of the killer-apps begins. Wasn’t there something about Google launching its own fibre network – about 1000 times faster than current offerings – as a massive STFU to telcos who are always winging about how hard it is?

This is along side tools that Google is offering so you can test if your ISP/Telco is throttling your connection:

www.measurementlab.net (from last year)
youtube speed test

And yes, my connection is about 1/3 of the global average.

6) Dude makes Snow-Slum in parent’s front yard, earns 15 minuts of fame

7) 6 Armed Hexacopter

Mind you, if it didn’t have 6 arms it wouldn’t be a hexacopter would it? Unless one of its arms were missing I suppose.

From the same place, an 8 armed Octocopter

Which I expect you could probably convert into a hexacopter quite easily. See… that’s the advantage of the self-teaching software that I was on about a couple of days back. If your dog gets hold of your octocopter and converts it into a pentacopter, it could still learn to fly.

The remaining tricopter would be a bit fucked obviously – I mean it probably wouldn’t be a copter at all – rather a mangled mess of chewed and slobbered on plastic… but genetic algorithms are genetic algorithms. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Laptop was on the blink, so it’s catchup time again.

1) Cerberus 2010

Remember that scary robot thing (big dog) that looks like something that’s escaped from The Fly 3, and is dying for a piss?

Well the military have said “Yes, ok, make us a big one“.

What could possibly go wrong?

2) Modular Kitchen Garden

I like this one because it has a built-in compost collector, so you don’t have to keep taking the rubbish out as much. I’m not sure about the virtues of having plants in boxes that shut out so much light, but I guess they can cope.

I have a feeling that at some point down the line we’ll have some sort of algal-driven composter, that takes any household waste (including cellulose/paper etc) and enzymatically breaks it down into useful components… or at least useful component soup – which might increase the demand for organically grown stuff, because people will be confronted with the witches-brew of toxins that pass for food today.

The ideal of course would be something that can process human waste… at the household level, rather than being pumped miles into ponds to be processed. What we’d actually use the “ingredient soup” for I don’t know, but it’s got to be better to be producing ingredients than… well, shit basically.

3) Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe

This has been around for years of course, but I’ve only just started watching it… religiously. All of the episodes are on Youtube – and it’s not proper piracy if you also read the Guardian (he writes for the Guardian) and somehow get sucked into the $75,000,000 that they make in advertising every year. You’re helping, no really you are. Tell other people about it.

He’s a really entertaining writer – and every once in a while, breaks the wall (so to speak) and exposes the mechanics of TV making, and how much of it is needlessly expensive bollocks because of retarded IP law.

If you’re in the UK you’ve probably seen this before – if not, possibly not because UK TV blocks non-UK viewers… because of retarded IP law.

4) Open Source moon-shot

Yours for $500-$700 million. You could pay for it with the proceeds from Avatar. An Avatard funded moon-shot.

You could actually fund a fairly big chunk of it, by going up and retrieving the former moon-shot vehicles and selling them on ebay – especially that one that was designed (in part) by Damien Hirst… his stuff sells for arms and legs etc. He’d be like all “that’s miiiiine” but you’d just go all “Nah, fuck you Damien. Rights of Salvage, LOL. Look it up”. He doesn’t need the money anyway – he could probably pay for a moon-shot on his own. He made this thing recently – a 30ft long wall containing 30,000 lab diamonds

and a dead cow’s head with some sort of Egyptian hat etc

Which I could have probably done if I’d thought of it… but to be honest, I’d rather fund an open-source moon-mission.

Anyway, I bought a black lab-diamond of ebay once, for about $20. Looks/feels a bit like sculpted coal. They’re quite light are diamonds. A bit insubstantial. Rubbish really. If they didn’t look like bling, no one would like them. They’d just be lumps of stuff.

5) Laser-cut street-map clocks

Deceptively simple. There’s quite a lot of quite neat stuff on their site, which is alas, down right now. There’s got to be something more useful than this than making clocks though. Maybe something like a making an ant-farm in the shape of your neighbourhood. No… ok, that’s pretty useless as well. How about making a suntanning template so you can suntan a map onto your back like that little pixie thing off Waterworld? Ok. Bad idea as well.

6) iPod/iPad/iPhad

Yea, yea… the most over-examined, over-hyped bit of plastic on the planet right now… but like… if Aliens discover this blog 16 million years from now and try to use it to reconstruct what exactly did go so badly wrong in the early 21st century, it would be remiss to leave it out… even though (now I recall) I did actually go on about it myself, the day before it launched – though in terms of a wider trend.

So… iPad thoughts #2

It’s a killer app from 2 different directions/markets.

a) it’s a killer app for old-media producers (producers producers producers)…

… who want to put Glossy Magazines, or textbooks or movies out in a digital form while retaining the “work once, get paid forever” model… which is (now that physical replication/distribution are no longer required) is what they have become. They are trying to carry on charging for value that they no longer provide.

It’s a god-send for top-down control. That’s what it’s for. That’s why it doesn’t have flash or USB or whatever – these are strategic emasculating decisions.

b) it’s a killer app for couch-spuds who only want to consume content passively, without having to deal with menus and such – there’s always money to be made in reducing/eliminating a learning curve. Every manual is an opportunity.

Someone once said, “there is no such thing as fate, just demographics” – and there’s this law of the jungle that states that if a niche exists, then something will rapidly fill it.

The anti-open web… The Evilweb is a niche. There is money in it, and a fair amount of biomass in it (in fact the passive-web might be bigger than the contributing-web)… so I think that this idea that the new wave of open-source Neo-Protestantism is going to completely dissolve the old, top-down tyranny of content-popery is possibly a mistake. This war is going to go on and on. It’s an attempt at reconciling two mutually exclusive modes of human organisation, that appear to be hard-wired into us.

Two killer-apps have evolved on either side of the iPad/iPhone vs Android/Linux/Personal-Computer line – one is the ability to enforce top-down control over ideas, the other is the ability to ignore top-down control. These are the same patterns that shaped the reformation… Mary Queen of Scots granted a monopoly of printing to The Stationers (thus creating copyright), to crush dissenting protestant opinion. Our copyright laws are based on a (failed) 500 year old attempt at religious censorship.

Copyright originated in an attempt to burn books before they were even printed… and it failed, but we’re still fighting over it… or at least there are still conflicts that divide along Christian religious lines. It didn’t get resolved… although I notice that the Pope is now allowed to visit England, whipping up a load of good old fashioned homophobia, which may or may not distract from the child-molestation scandals that have wracked this venerable abomination institution so much of late.

(from)

Sorry – Forgiveness is a Christian virtue, and I’m not a Christian. Ah see you wee man.

Anyway, back to open/closed tech : These two killer-apps are at their cores, mutually exclusive – but top-down never goes away… and there’s still a lot of money in passive consumption.

So with any luck the two can exist side by side – which means the old school will need to accept that it can no longer control something that’s uncontrollable… without creating the instruments (and worldview) of police-statehood…

… and its worth noting that Apple has already waded into a mire of legal fuckups over “ownership” of “ideas” surrounding the iPad. It’s unworkable people. It’s unworkable even if you believe in it.

Intellectual property law a Self-tying Gordian Knot. In the long-run you’re upfucking yourself. This tendency towards legal convolution is getting worse.

6) Gear ring

Kinekt Design’s Gear Ring from Glen Liberman on Vimeo.

7) Underwater guns from China

Oh that’s just fucking marvelous isn’t it… not for the fact that it’s being done, or that someone would actually want to shoot scuba divers, but for the cold-war era photo-quality and styling. It’s all about paranoia people.

8) Lego Diffraction Grating

For 24 hour plastic party people.

9) Ibotz Robo-ball

It’s got a laser-beam in it for shooting other robo-balls, or for fucking up the 24 hour plastic party people.

Fortunately, it’s a kitset, so you’ll be able to put your own 1st-person POV camera inside it and fill it up with liquid binary explosives and LSD-laced glittery confetti etc. And then what? I don’t know really, but it will make you feel kindof special driving it around. Like you’re in some sort of movie where the guy has an explosive glittery acid bomb, but doesn’t really know what to do with it.

10) 3 Armed Digital Printer

YES!!!

I’ve been playing with this idea in my head for the last week or so, before this turned up… only I want to make mine out of bamboo, because I want to make everything out of bamboo… because bamboo grows on trees. Bamboo trees. There’s loads of them down by the river in my home town – I sometimes drive down in my car and sit there watching the ducks, wondering what the fuck I’m going to do with my life

BUT NOW I KNOW!

I’m going to blow up ducks with a remote controlled, LSD-laced glitter bomb. Existential crisis solved. I’ve finally found my true purpose. It’s a full moon quite soon as well. Where’s my lippy?

Ok – the last one was only 1/2 a… latte. This may be another 1/2… or not, depending on whether or not you see things as being 1/2 full or 1/2 empty – or simply that your glass is twice as big as it should be, and basically one big UI fuckup.

1) DIY (kindof) Plush Toys.

In which kids draw random and disturbing monsters etc, and talented people turn them into really rather good cuddly toys.

Only the blurb says “Shidonni is based on unique proprietary patented algorithms and using Microsoft Silverlight“.

Idiots.

I think this is possibly an indicator of the way digital fabbing might go though – some sort of lego thing in software that allows people to skip the learning curve that it takes to acquire the talent that it takes to do these things using a CAD program. The Catalyst in this example though is the talent of the person actually making the things. Cheating a bit – that needs to be a software task.

2) iPhone Planes

In your mind, dude:

Basically a program that makes WWII fighter plane noises based on the pitch/yaw/acceleration/whatever of your phone.

I can’t believe you did that. Brilliant. Kindof.

3) What the future will be like in 2010

Which is a scanned/photographed/transcripted kid’s book from 1972. Presumably putting it on the web like this is illegal. Presumably the author doesn’t care because he’s a sane human being with a sense of humour, and besides, people don’t buy this one that much any more. Presumably, the publishers will use this as an example of how the internet is killing their business, even though this is free advertising for something they a) don’t sell any more but b) want to stop anyone else from making copies of…

… reminds me of a cat that I used to have that ate frozen peas… to stop the other cat from getting them, even though he hated eating frozen peas and grimaced through the whole ordeal.

Idiots.

Apart from Angus (the cat) on account of Angus being one of the greatest cats ever.

Assuming of course that this is what they’re doing – it tends to be what publishers do.

4) Android to watch, Android to watch…

In which someone has persuaded his Android phone to pick up the data for “next available bus” and transmit it to his watch. This uses Open-Watch software, which is cool because you can use it for all sorts of other things as well.

There’s been a bit of a backlash against the Nexus One launch hype – it’s better at some things, worse at others… as you’d expect. The sales haven’t been great – but open-source was ever a slow-burner. The $550 disconnection charge is fucking reprehensibly criminal…

… but the killer-app with Android is that it’s open. You can do things like this watch hack without having to go begging to Apple.

The data that this watch hack is using has only just become “available” though… ie: until a couple of months ago, a company was sending cease and desist letters to anyone trying to use this data.

Idiots.

5) Bloke in Wheelchair Held up by Police Robot while 10 Police Hide like Giggling Sissies Behind Their Van

Is this “A Good Thing”?. Hard to say. I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t a bit like conducting
police-work from within the safety of a tank.

6) Avatards

A bit like a good Bacronym… Avatards is one of those names that is so good, that you have to invent something to… fill its shoes, so to speak. In this case, it’s rather easy… avatar fanboys etc… and according to CNN (who destroyed their credibility (forever) during the Bush years)(idiots), audiences are experiencing depression when faced with… reality, when they leave the theatre.

Speaking of reality, I think this picture is particularly funny

On account of the guy on the right being caught mid-nom on a piece of pizza.

Jesus, don’t you people ever stop eating? Incredible. I’ve never seen anyone eat pizza in a movie place before… I mean the distraction of sitting next to some popcorn munching fuck does my head in, but a whole Pizza? Ber-limey.

I think this is quite interesting though – and I’m guessing that at some point in the next 10 years, a convergence of something like this and World-of-Warcraft, will see people choosing The Matrix over their real lives to the extent that their real lives start falling apart and it becoming a real problem.

Back to Copyright… (because who could resist)… apparently Cameron has done what Led Zepplin did back in the day, and allowed himself to be HEAVILY influenced by someone who’s input was not entirely given the credit it was possibly due. ie: He nicked it off the Russians.

Or did he? Guess we’ll never know eh… but rest assured if you try the same trick with Avatar, then Rupert Murdoch’s company (that owns it) will sue you back to the 14th Century, and then lobby the US govt into trying to impose the machinery for police-statehood on all countries that the US would trade with… which is all countries.

Crying all the time that the internet is killing their business, even though they’re making billions more than they’ve ever done before.

Idiots. Enemies of Humanity.

7) Google Decided to Stop Censoring Its Results In China

Which is interesting – because it’s a blow against the legitimacy of state censorship… and as the EFF predicted, Legitimacy is one of the key things that’s going to be scrapped over this year.

That’s what all this ACTA crap is about… Govts and Corporate Lobbyists colluding to try to make control of the root a morally right position for them to take.

It’s not. All power is inherently illegitimate, and needs to justify itself (at every step) to the people it governs. If a power needs to censor, then all bets are off. It’s illegitimate.

No Ifs, no fucking buts.

8) Tacky is the New Brilliant

There used to be this furniture shop in London that sold UNBELIEVABLE furniture… stuff for insane Oil-Sheiks etc. Gold Lions. Coffee Tables made out of a life-sized, nude, gold limbo-dancer holding up a massive bit of glass… and the ever-present New York skyline pictures, painted onto black velvet, and lit up from behind etc. Marvelous.

Here are a couple of others having a fair crack at it…

Glow in the Dark Sofas

And my favourite… wall-sized-digital-pictures

Although they have managed to make them look sortof tasteful, which is a shame – I’m not sure if you can use your own pictures… they have a “portfolio” of cliche-ware images… and one or two that do sortof suggest you might be able to use your own.

It would be brilliant if you could. I’d have photos of me

Or a regular day at the Taylor Household.

Obviously in the future, you’re going to be able to get e-wallpaper, and change it on a whim etc. That would rock. You could actually BE in Harry Potter land… although the Harry Potter Movies are getting darker and darker – I could hardly tell what was going on in the last one – at this rate the next one will be a totally black screen with posh voices clunking about and talking bollocks in the background… and you can already simulate that one just be turning the lights off.

9) Ok, that’s enough for now…

Two short movies to do with lego

(via)

Ok – been away for a bit but have gotten back in one piece. Feel like crap. Trying to give up coffee… which screws me up big-time. I’ll be bed-ridden for 3 days.

Anyway, this week’s Link Latte will be a little different on account of it being about 10 things that I’ve only just found today, and haven’t been storing up over the last week. So you’ll need to read slowly as this will take a little while to write.

Here we go:

1) Metal Printed 3d Puzzle thing

Which is apparently invented by Bram Coen who also invented Bittorrent. Or is it Dracula? Or both? Hard to say. It’s cool though because it is actually quite a nice shiney bit of 3D printery. Things are coming along

2) Egg House

Which looks like a cross between an egg, and some sort of shoe-tidy. Which is… um… cool, but um… maybe you’ve forgotten something?

The site has lots of other photos – the best thing about this I think is that they actually made it – and that is everything. Actual Reality… even if your girlfriend does have to sleep on a shelf… which she isn’t going to like. Oh deary me no.

3) Monocoque

Oooh…

“Monocoque’s structural skin is generated using a Voronoi pattern, the density of which corresponds to simulated loading conditions. The distribution of shear-stress lines and surface pressure is embodied in the allocation and relative thickness of the vein-like elements built into the skin. The prototype model was 3-D printed using OBJET’s Polyjet matrix technology which allows for the assignment of structural properties to multiple 3-D printed substance”

Yes, exactly. Can’t find any other references to it, but I like it etc. 3D printed exoskeletons just like proper mollusks make. It would be well cool if the printer sat on a leading edge somewhere – like a window-cleaner, allowing a building (or whatever) to self-build.

4) Seed Bombs

This has been around as a concept for ages, but at last someone has gone to the trouble of making them in a form that will give our paranoid 21st Century Western police an excuse to arrest you on anti-terrorism charges so their illustrious political leaders can justify their morally perilous existences.

These remind me (alas) of the (quite legal) cluster-bomb design – which is basically an aerial-propelled land-mine scatterer… where the bomblets are designed to look a bit like toys so kids pick them up. There’s something not quite right here.

5) Gene Gun

Which I found on a site about growing magic mushrooms. It says “The gene can be incorporated into the genome, but it doesn’t have to be for it to be expressed. So if you throw a whole lot of DNA into the nucleus of a cell, it will be expressed as long as that DNA is there (which was 3-4 days for the plant and animal cells I’ve worked on). It’s called ‘transient expression’ and it’s pretty easy. If you want stable expression, you just select for the cells that have the DNA (by introducing a herbicide/antibiotic resistance gene) and wait longer than the 3-4 days. Most of the cells will die, but the ones that integrated the DNA into their chromosomes will survive.
So it just depends on whether you want to study the gene or protein product, or if you actually want to create a transgenic organism. If it’s the former, you’d go with transient expression because it’s really easy. For plants you use a gene gun, for animal cells you use a chemical called lipofectamine.”

and as far as I can gather, it’s about getting magic mushrooms to glow in the dark – which would (I suppose) make them easier to find. At night I mean.

Only these don’t look like proper shrooms to me. I wouldn’t eat them.

6) Dope Pipe Art

Speaking of which, some of these are pretty cool

It is sort of noticeable how much art seems to grow in the cracks between what’s allowable, and what’s not.

7) Steampunk Nixie Clock

Because anything to do with Nixie Clocks is instantly cool. They glow in the dark you see. We are a simple people.

8) Robotic Orchestra

Although it does seem to have a human guitar player, playing along to it… which is (in my experience) absolutely typical of guitar players.

Also from Make Magazine, but not related in the slightest are these graffiti bone-china plates, which are incredibly cool

and speaking of which, here’s a Starry Starry Night Cake

9) Nanotech LEDs

Ok – this is really just an excuse for a cool picture… apparently new LED palettes are being created using nanotech… have you noticed how nanotech seems to have become a catch-all description for pretty much anything emerging from this materials revolution we’re in? I thought Nanotech was to do with tiny little robot things that devour the whole universe?

10) See through laptop

So obviously CES or whatever was on last week and a load of new inventions were showcased… and I’ve managed to avoid all of them, except this one – which I find interesting because it’s one of those things that we like because we’ve seen it in Sci-Fi movies, but which in real life, possibly isn’t that useful.

Because… it may look so cool that we can hardly stand it… but look at the screen you’re looking at now (ok, you already are). Imagine if you could see through it. Would that make it easier to use? I doubt it. They talk about using them as head-up displays for cars… yup. They’ve just banned mobile phone usage in NZ (catching up with the rest of the world) on account of people getting distracted and crashing all the time. I can’t imagine this would help terribly. It’s purely about looking cool rather than being useful.

Could be good for glasses though – so you can do that augmented reality thing without looking like a total prannet.

–

Ok – that’s it for now… Only 1/2 way really. God damn things move fast. I wish they’d hurry up though.

It’s occurred to me that I haven’t been superficial enough recently etc, so I thought I’d write down a series of thoughts about ring-tones for cars. Because people have been talking about this recently – on account of electric cars being completely silent, so you won’t know they’re coming unless you look both ways before you cross the road.

1) I saw this on my fav website Notcot.org yesterday:

2) and it reminded me of those musical roads they have in Korea.

and Japan.

3) The whole notion of quiet cars needing to make noise, reminds me of The Locomotives Act of 1865, in which the law stated that someone with a flag had to walk in front of a motor vehicle to protect the roads and the public from injury… or maybe it was because the people passing the law had interests in the rail industry, and wanted to control cars. I’d say the latter… knowing what we know today etc.

Still… 150 years later, cars have killed more people than all other weapons in human history put together. Probably.

4) Some people already have ring-tones… massive bass-speakers that are so loud that they cause your trousers to rustle from 3 blocks away.

5) Have you noticed how the more someone spends on a car stereo, the worse their taste in music is?

6) There’s going to be wankers aren’t there? I just know it – someone’s going to use “Born to be Wild” or “The Ride of The Valkyries”. I imagine that what is cool/not will coalesce out very quickly – although this doesn’t seem to have had much effect with phone ringtones.

7) But if everyone who drives an electric car is one of your Tofu-Types they’ll probably play… I don’t know… what sort of music to Tofu-Types listen to? Whale noises? They’ll probably not go for music at all and go for something natural – like the sound of a wind-farm. Which would be funny because it would annoy the people who didn’t want a wind-farm in their back-yards because of the noise they make. Now look at them… they’ve got tofu-types in the back yard instead, LOL.

8) Personally I’d go for some sort of 70s sci-fi noise – the car noise of Logan’s run for example – from back in the day when all English actors/actresses were posh and gorgeous

9) But you never know what people are going to do – I mean someone has taken a little bit of film of a Logan’s Run Robot, looped it, and put it up on youtube… and it’s been seen about 30,000 times. Probably by the same person. That’s a bit odd if you ask me.

10) Speaking of which – back in about 81, there was this kid who had made a tape of the video game below and used to wander round town with it playing on a MASSIVE ghetto-blaster… and it did seem quite cool, weirdly enough.

Maori kids were geniuses at this game. The could get up to like the thousandth level – I could never get past 3 or 4. The kid who wandered around with the ghetto blaster was a Maori kid. It was like a ring-tone for walking and being cool etc.

Is this a good idea?

What it is, is… a system that you attach to a… thing (like the truck above) and it senses high-speed incoming projectiles, blows them up in mid-air and directs a hail of bullets at wherever the projectile came from…

… all in a microsecond, and without human intervention. Automated killing machine etc. I can imagine a bird flying through the air – trips the system and is vapourized, at exactly the same time as it’s nest, some distance away is turned into a small cloud of spiralling feathers and bits of straw.

It’s one of those things that once it’s invented, it can’t be uninvented… and it can’t not be used. “It saves lives”. It also represents a quantum (being too small a word) leap in whatever arms-race is headed this way – for systems that fight and kill at faster than human reaction speeds.

And I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before – except maybe with landmines… and I’m not sure that it’s not a genie that one day we might wish we could put back in the bottle. But we can’t… What Darpa (for it is they) have done here is (merely) throw a hell of a lot of money and expertise at a “toy” that you can find umpteen dozen variations of on youtube. People are already making their own automated paintball weapons systems in their backyards. Not good enough to shoot down incoming shells of course (and maybe that will never come), but probably good enough to splatter an armoured car with paint, before being shot to kingdom come.

I’ve got this weird vision of war… which is played entirely as a game (in other people’s countries) where people actually pay to fight, remotely. The manufacturing of the weapons is outsourced to local sweatshops etc… and the weapons are all a bit shit (plastic toys really) – but it doesn’t matter because if you can mobilise 150,000 bored teenage video-game ninjas who don’t actually die when you shoot them down, but simply launch the next drone… then things like aircraft-carriers or helicopters might be… well, as effective as a battle-axe against a swarm of bees. A physical denial-of-service attack. You probably don’t need that many bees.

I know I said I was going to do these on Saturday, and it’s now Wednesday but in this, as with all else, I am an innovator, so you can stop your moaning etc.

1) Popup Lego Zen Buddhist Temple

2) Waving-Arms-Around-Interface actually doing something useful:

Cool. Maybe in the future someone will make one of these interfaces that allows you to see in real-time the damage that the interface itself is doing to your spinal column

3) More Winger Insanity

A game for people so disconnected with reality that they can no longer count the fingers they hold up in front of their own faces… fantasizing about defeating Obama in an imaginary coup.

Utterly unbelievable. I mean I know I keep going on about the reality-disconnect that goes hand in hand with weapons, but seriously… courtesy of the massive right-wing-propaganda-machine (this disease inspired by The Powell Memo), it’s looking very much to me like America is becoming too stupid to survive.

It has become impossible for rational public discourse… “Debate” doesn’t happen. What happens is Rationality permanently on the defensive against a well-funded, relentless barrage of well crafted sound-bites… which are more often than not, pathetically flimsy lies – but there’s so many of the fucking things that it seriously interferes with the possibility of a normal conversation happening.

It’s not freedom of speech, it’s conversational jerrymandering.

And it’s not the people – it’s the media (and some of the people)… witness the recent gay-pride rally in Washington, completely ignored by the media while a similar-sized right-wing nutter protest received blanket coverage. The corporate media are in love with this shit… well, I guess they would be. They help fund it.

I saw some video recently where Janeane Garofalo was going on about racism… and how the media are always nudging things towards violence (it was the one where she asked what would have happened if black people had turned up armed to a McCain rally)… tried to find the video again. Couldn’t… but have you seen the comments on Youtube whenever there’s a video of Janeane Garofalo? You people are fucked. Seriously. Get a divorce before you hurt someone.

This is the inevitable byproduct of the emotionally manipulative propaganda techniques that are being employed… using “values” and framing to bypass critical thinking and appeal straight to some sort of xenophobic sub-brain. This really, seriously needs to stop. It’s inciting violence… and over what? For what? Who’s benefiting?

Enough. I’m sick of it. We’re all sick of it.

4) Video of Nanosolar’s new European plant

You’ll need to click the image to go to the site with the video… because it’s indulging in that archetype of web-fuckwittery known as “autoplay” and danged if I can get it to stop

Cool. Mind you, I’ve worked in a lot of factories… and they always had people working in them – allowing said people to buy the things that the factory produced. If they wanted. I guess you could make your manufacturing process soooo efficient that people on unemployment benefit could afford to buy your stuff.

5) Cool DIY LED Fob watch

6) Cool collection of Stirling Engines

Only the owner of the videos appears to have deleted them… and put them back, but not updated his site.

This all came from the rather fab Steampunk collection on Wired

7) Myna – a new online Sound Editor from Aviary

Aviary being a bit of a power-house of creative online applications. One to watch I think… they’ve had some pretty good ideas in the past.

8 ) Treasure-hunting crow-trainer open-sourced

This turned up a while back on TED…and I probably went on about it before… but here it is again

This has got to be useful for something more useful than collecting lost change. How about getting plastic bags out of trees or finding your keys or something. Picking up the million-square miles of rubbish that is now floating in the Pacific Ocean.

9) Misc Robotery:

a) robot that feels
b) silent robot muscles
c) and two more robots that might be useful for “Search and Rescue”, which is what people say when they’ve made a cool toy but can’t think of anything to use it for… or don’t want to admit that the only thing it’s good for is helping the military suck money out of the economy, and taking it out into the desert and burning it by the bale.

Which isn’t to say it’s not a really cool toy, because it is.

But this obsession with search and rescue? What must the Martians think? “Oh yes, a technologically advanced civilisation… except that so much of their technology seems to be for finding themselves when they get lost. Yes they do have GPS. Whatever. Nice place to go on holiday, but I wouldn’t want to live there”.

10) A nice juxtaposition on how far we’ve evolved in terms of transport ideas

I don’t know what it with things where you sit inside the wheel itself. There seems to be a lot of them about, and I can’t think of any reason why they might be a good idea other than they look kindof cool. Kindof.

Saturday being the day where I chuck all sorts of random stuff at the screen at the same time, because I can’t possibly keep up etc.

1) Massive Puppet Show in Berlin

Because a guaranteed way of making great art better, is to make it a LOT bigger.

2) Surveillance as a game.

Basically Mechanical-Turking CCTV watching… with prizes going to people who catch other people committing crimes. I’m betting though, that the rewards would be far greater in terms of attention etc if people just spied on other people with their own cellphones. People profiting from spying on other people is an insidious and inevitable step I think. But what exactly is it that we’re building here?

3) Piano Stairs

4) Crowd-sourced Vitamin Water

This is interesting because it has the potential to reverse this trend where everything is outsourced except branding and product-design… with this there’s this potential for customers to design their own product and packaging… cutting out everyone except the manufacturer.

Whether it’s even close to doing that I don’t know… and whether a “MySpace of flavours” is necessarily a good thing debatable, still… at least it’s vitamin water, rather than coke, with it’s 8 tablespoons of sugar etc. If people were left to their own devices would they actually make products that were good for them, rather than just injecting cholesterol straight into their arteries? Hard to say.

5) A sudden rash of 3-wheelers

They (always “they”) have obviously taken my recent rant about electric cars to heart, and have responded by making a whole load more of them… all a bit improbable if you ask me.

Czech Amphibious Electric Assist Vehicle

At least partly because anything Czech is automatically great.

BMW, semi-enclosed motorbike with rollbars etc.

An idea fucked up by retarded laws to do with crash-helmets. Fuckem. If we want to take our lives into our own hands, that’s our business. Suicide should NOT be illegal.

Tilty Nissan

I’m not really sure what it is with these tilty designs… there seem to be a lot of them about at the moment.

Another one from BMW

Which linked to this cloth car, which isn’t a bad idea:

If you’ll just ignore the corporate bullshit-speak that that guy spouts, as though he really means it. BMW… It’s all about being “intelligent”… it’s all about stretching a neat, seamless skin of “intelligence” over the same old corporate framework.

I don’t believe you.

Anyway… back to the tilty things… or not. There was a recent video on wired or somewhere… of a German variant – looked really fun to drive, but danged if I can find the video now… so here are some tilty bike-car things instead:

6) Speaking of which… Nissan also seems to think these are Concept Cars

Which they’re obviously doing just to annoy me… because they go beyond looking like teapots and actually look like salt-shakers instead.

7) Ray Guns etc

The Navy obviously having gotten into an arms-race with itself in its own mind… fighting other people who also have ray guns. Mars perhaps…

… Well the moon didn’t exactly fight back recently did it? It would have been hilarious if Nasa bombing the moon had blown off a bit of moon rock – that had gone zooming all the way back to earth and landed on the bonnet of Obama’s car. That would teach him for getting a Nobel Prize when he hasn’t actually done anything yet. None of the stuff that I voted for him to do anyway. Not that I voted mind… but I did, in my way, campaign for him.

8 ) Tube Amp

I do actually genuinely want one of these… and I’m not the sort of person who generally wants stuff.

I don’t want one that looks like this though… it has to be portable… something that looks like an alien sex-toy that you can put in your pocket… goes between our iPod and your ears to make MP3s sound like proper music instead of the crushed, compressed, grating crap they are at the moment. I want Vinyl back basically.

9) A fantastic museum of futuristic cars from yesteryear

10) Barbie Cafe

For all your Barbie Needs… if owning a Barbie is not enough and you actually have to BE Barbie.

11) Million Frames a Second Bullets

–

Ok… that’s enough for now.

I think I’ll make Saturday Link-Latte day… where I throw lots of disconnected stuff at the screen at the same time, because I simply can’t keep up. This is an idea at least partly (or completely) stolen from www.darkroastedblend.com/ who I love, and who have 120 of them already, although theirs don’t have pictures and are a bit less chatty.

Ok. Here we go.

1) Someone sent me this… it’s a service where you can send yourself back to the 1970s – which would be cool because you’d get to see Star Wars for the first time, and see Led Zepplin, and cruise down Van Nuys Bvd on a Saturday night with Tom Petty on the stereo.

I would’ve used one of my own photos but I know how annoying Susan would find it if I used one of hers instead, so I will:

There are various different filters and whatnot…

So there you go.

Things were better in the 70s generally speaking… well, in one important way: everything was mapped out for you. The Future came in big, easy to deal with phases : “university”, “job”, “someone to love”, “kids” etc. The Suburbs… nothing was ever going to go wrong. You took it easy. You rolled with the flow. There was no point fighting – on our side or theirs… we had all the momentum… our energy would simply prevail…

2) High Altitude Photography With Glider

A bit like the balloon thing form a couple of days back, but with a glider instead so you can control where it’s going to land. Something like that.

In the future, when people have something difficult or fiddley to do, they’ll stick their tongue out to concentrate.

3) A new generation of Reprap’s making a first-print, with Julian laughing like a mad scientist.

4) A couple more things about cloud-sourced manufacturing… where a) people can make (potentially) real, actual money out of it, but b) the main thing they’re making is parts for other repraps. It’s The DIY Machine Bubble. You heard it here first.

5) Spotty Rooms

6) Rather Fab DIY Prop Art

6) Musical Instruments made out of stuff. Like sand.

The trouble with this sort of thing is the energy seems to go into the knobs and things rather than the songwriting. Songwriting really needs to come first.

This is cool though… similar “found” sounds approach and a really good songwriter as well.

7) Weather Bracelets

This is a good idea waiting in the wings I think. Reminds me of something that hasn’t happened yet.

8 ) A campaign seeking an international treating limiting military robots.

You’re kidding right? Ok. You’re not kidding. Good thing too. We really need this.

Trouble is, it hasn’t got the a farcically flimsy, ephemeral, half-arsed ghost of a snowball in hell’s chance of happening. I mean the catholic church and various EU aristocracy tried to ban crosswbows back in the day… on account of their being “a threat to the social order”. People tried to limit car speed by having people walk in front holding flags. And they were right. Tens of millions of people wouldn’t have died if they’d got their way.

These people simply don’t get how badly, longingly, desperately, clingingly people (well, the ones that matter) want weaponised robots.

9 ) Speaking of which, laser-cutting from a plane.

But as I keep saying, “if you blow up a $10 tent with a $million cruise missile, you haven’t won”. Whenever you see a cruise missile… you should also envision an equal but opposite ghost-missile headed back the other way… to a hospital, a school… that won’t ever be made in the originating country… because instead of doing something useful with the money, you’ve given it to someone who’s taken it out into the desert and burned it.

What’s the bet that the American fiasco in Iraq has wound up killing more Americans through misappropriated resources than 100 9/11s put together?

And now the wingers are talking about a military coup.

So um… don’t envision a military laser as a stream of photons burning a hole in a (cough) “bad guy”’s clapped out pickup. Envision it as a murderous drain of $100 notes going in the other direction… straight towards you, and whatever future that you thought your tax-dollars ought to entitle you to. Every cruise missile, every drone, every “smart bomb” represents a school that won’t be built back home.

Ask not for whom the Bomb tolls. It tolls for thee.

10) Cool Lego Dudes

11) and lastly I stumbled across an entire hoard of home-made Power Loaders like the one off Aliens

Some of which appear to be better than others.

But there are a hell of a lot of them on youtube.

I love how such a lot of the Robotics Revolution isn’t being driven by any real need, but is based quite heavily on things the people liked from Sci Fi movies.