GENOMICON

This turned up today

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

A particularly cool variation on the tilt-shift photography that has been turning up of late.

from flickr : House Photography

There’s a Flickr group devoted to it, and excellent tutorials about the place to make sure the meme is propogated etc (when did so many people turn into teachers?)

from flickr : articnomad

The subcultures behind these are actually fairly massive – describing themselves as “overunity engineers” – the example above has been copied (without the success) by a number of youtubees, but there are others – a large number of which appear (for some reason) to be Australians.

There are hundreds and hundreds of these things :

All shapes and sizes. I find them absolutely fascinating. There’s enough material for an entire book of these things on their own.

Probably I suspect similar to alchemy, the value of these things is in the spin-off discoveries that happen along the way… except of course that the technologies being dabbled with here are kindof stuck in the 1900s. It’s physics rather than chemistry, and I don’t think any new ground is being covered here… but it’s still a lot better than watching television.

Maybe that’s the gold that proves the process… assuming that alchemy wasn’t really to do with chemistry in the first place.

Still, I hate to say it, but sometimes these neo-alchemists appear to be slightly more sane than the detractors

Ok, so someone invents a Rubik’s Cube (Rubik) and a couple of years later they’re all over the planet.

Then a couple of decades pass and the internet gets invented and people start putting their Rubik’s Cube solutions up on Youtube… and as this is an attention economy, things naturally mutate. Fast.

I’ve mentioned the subculture of cube-solving lego-robots. There’s also a bunch of people who do multiple cubes blindfolded. The ones that grabbed my attention are these though:

A 20×20 simulation:

The guy provides an explanation for how he did it on another movie. That inspired (somewhere down the track) this… 100×100

Which is accompanied by a noob-attacking monologue conducted via that state-of-the-art medium, MS-Paint.

After that I saw this:

Which is a 5 dimensional version… which really is off-the-scale cool.

These might all be fakes of course. They could quite easily be filmed backwards – but the mere ability to visualise a 5 dimensional cube is a feat in itself… and it’s the process I find most interesting – copy->mutate->copy->mutate.

from famous look-a-like faces

A meme-incubater of things that look like memes but actually aren’t

The crab-router might even be a better platform for rep-rapping than the original rep-rapper. It could do scary things like wandering about finding its own fuel etc. I was thinking that it will be a while before it can make its own servos etc… but then I remembered the machine that someone made out of lego a year or two ago for solving Rubik’s Cubes… 

…so I looked it up on youtube and now there’s a whole sub-culture of Rubik’s cube solving machines

Which kindof makes me think that maybe someting that can make servos might not be so impossible afterall – just because I can’t imagine it, doesn’t mean someone else can’t. Here for example is something I hadn’t considered:

Robots that are basically single-cell creatures forming mult-cell organisms on their own.

There’s a talk here by Kevin Kelly talking about the evolution of technology – and with specific interest here is when he talks about technological evolution never dieing – the resurgence of Stirling Engines is an example of what can happen here. The technology is about 120 years old, and now they’re appearing all over the place.

What we’re seeing here is a new type of evolution.

Normal natural selection involves replicators blindly mutating and the best combinations surving to replicate again. The combination of the internet and a release of cognitive surplus (and open-source licensing models) means that every single replication/mutation can conceivably take place with the entire knowledge of everything that’s been tried and worked so far.

It’s a type of evolution that doesn’t happen in the dark. It’s still competitive but there’s a kind of modular over-arching consciousness that’s governing and driving it.