GENOMICON

Worth it just for the slomo water drops at the beggining.

Observable phenomena is observable phenomena… the big question I have with this though is “Structure of a droplet? What’s that?”

I find it hard to get wound up by homeopathy… as far as I can see it’s probably placebo on steroids. Or like… not steroids. I don’t have a problem with placebos… if it works, it’s a good place to start. If your brain can heal you without recourse to toxins, then great… but if it ain’t working after a week (or if it’s not the sort of condition where there’s a week to spare), then chemicals it is.

But you know… the scientific method is the great leveler. I feel similarly about homeopathic mumbo jumbo as I do about skeptic’s scoffing on the basis of “dilution being ridiculous”. Observable phenomena is observable phenomena. If a theory can’t be disproven, it’s not a theory.

O how I love this sort of thing:

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Irish Perpetual Motion Machine company Steorm, have (after 6 years) released a video or something of their miracle-working device. There’s even a live feed here, where you can actually see it working, so that proves it works.

If I was a gazzlionaire, instead of buying a ferrari or whatever, I’d set up a perpetual motion machine museum… and I think I’d set it up in Prague, because I like Prague – and in Prague there’s a street where all the alchemists used to live – Golden Lane.

I go there every time I go there, apart from the last time I went there… because there were SO MANY PEOPLE that they actually had bouncers etc to stop people being crushed. They were charging people to get in as well. It’s a license to print money.

Anyway – the photo above is cool (click on it for the big one) because all the houses are in the shade except one which has received the beneficence of The Lord who is called APOLLO, who was born on a floating island, surrounded by swans.

Oh this is an absolute classic…

Because we all know that the first thing… THE very first thing, that anyone is going to do when they invent an antigravity device, is they’ll solve that problem that has weighed so heavy upon the human soul for so very, very long… they’ll solve the problem of getting up and going to the fucking kitchen to get a glass of water.

Although to be fair… if you’re the sort of person who’s so lazy they’ll actually go out and buy a flying tennis ball (or better still, get a flying basket ball to go out and buy one for you) so you don’t have to get up off the sofa to get a drink of water… well you’re probably not that into “water” are you? No, you prefer to drink coca-cola with an extra couple of table-spoons of sugar in it, or pure lard, straight from the mini-vat etc.

Still. Never mind. It’s the Electrolux Designlab Competition for inventing inventions that will never in a million years actually get invented. Oooh shiney etc. Products.

That said, I quite like this:

It’s a little robot made out of an upturned coke bottle, that carries a plant around until it finds a suitable spot, and then (presumably) it plants it. I’m rather enamoured of the concept that in the future, every tree will have its own gardener… and this goes some way towards that… or at least it would, if it weren’t just a cartoony drawing. Maybe I should make one myself. I’ve got an upturned coke bottle somewhere. The walky bit with the massive eye could be tricky, but what the hey. You’ve got to start somewhere.

So um… don’t get me wrong. I’m all for designers dreaming dreams etc… what really gets up my goat though is the way this stuff is replicated across the web as though it’s actually real. It’s link-bait… let me see…

… let me see… let me see if my favourite eco-bullshit-artist site has anything on it… www.ecofriend.org, the spiritual home of “made up stuff that might be a bit green”…

… oh yes, there it is… momentarily dipping its toe into the waters of uncertainty with “[designer] has tried to make”… (italics mine) but from then on in, it’s all present-tense as though this thing actually exists, and as though the energy required to make a ball fly around collecting raindrops is somehow less eco-angry than simply leaving a fucking cup out in the rain.

Rant over etc.

Still spherical robots. Marvelous.

Looks like someone’s actually attempting to make one of those scary spherical police-state-bots off The Prisoner.

A Spy Zorb.

Speaking of spheres, here’s a nice take…

A quater-sphere projector screen for playing games in.

There’s a nice poetic juxtoposition between inventing a zorb who’s job it is to wander about… “watching” people in actual reality, and inventing another one who’s purpose is for people to sit inside their own little reality, and never see beyond the skin at all.

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edit : further to the rant at the top, check out this video from Microsoft

Otherwise known as the blogosphere – that parallel universe where someone only has to draw a picture of something for it to become real, re-published across the net as a world-saving fait accompli.

Ooh. Beads. Shiney.

I don’t know why I find this so annoying. Really I should like it – it’s people being creative etc, throwing wonderful ideas into the soup. It’s an explosion of creativity and democratised publishing, it generally starts with designers (and design blogs) who are pretty inspirational…

… but somewhere in the process I can’t help but feel it turns into snake oil. The purpose of it goes from creativity to clamorous, panting attention seeking – tricking people into thinking they can actually buy this stuff somewhere. They always take pains to skirt around the fact that what they’re presenting is actually just a drawing of something.

The greeny blogs are the worst – they’ve created this whole diorama of world-saving consumerism, and none of it’s fucking real. To pick a random example (and I won’t provide a link because I’m sure they’re nice people, and I have no particular desire to piss on anyone’s chips). There are currently 10 articles on the front page – and they look wonderful. They are:

1) a drawing of a solar powered market – that doesn’t actually exist
2) a drawing of a bamboo prefab house – that doesn’t actually exist
3) a drawing of a university data centre – that doesn’t actually exist
4) some people aiming to build a solar powered bike – doesn’t actually exist
5) researchers aiming to power cars with cottonseed oil – doesn’t actually exist
6) an energy efficient computer power supply. It exists!
7) a drawing of a green office block – that doesn’t actually exist
8 ) a lovely looking design for a green vehicle – that doesn’t actually exist
9) a test flight by a 747 using 50/50 biofuel / jet fuel. It exists!
10) an energy efficient house in Australia, who’s roof has been extended, and looks a bit like an eyelid, though I personally would have called it an “eve” not dissimilar to what any other house in the entire country has. This exists too, but like, so what?

Maybe they’re not supposed to exist – maybe it’s purely about design and I’m completely wrong, and I’m a cunt and I should shut the fuck up… but the pattern here is spread across the web. It’s kindof like a liberals version of Fox News ending their headlines with a question mark. There simply isn’t enough news to report so they make stuff up – or in this case, report upon the “aspirational” flagship projects of designers and architects, treating them as though they’ve actually made it all the way to actually, actual, real, reality.

C’mon. It’s living in a bubble. We need shit that’s real. Drawing pictures of wishful thinking doesn’t cut it.

So on that note… here are a load of kinetic chargers, some of which are real, some of which aren’t… and lets face it, it’s not always easy to tell the difference… and really, I’m not complaining about these because they look quite cool as well, and I am quite conflicted about the whole thing.

Maybe it acts as a sort of – market research – designs that create a buzz are merged into tomorrow’s DNA. Who knows. Something about it doesn’t feel right though.

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Still. Whatever:

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Laundry balls. You put them in your clothes drier and the constant motion charges the battery inside. They look cool. These would be worth having no matter what they did. The Linking site is about “form over function” as well, so no complaints there etc – other than that they publish things that other sites then assume to be reality.

Bullet shaped charger thing – you wear a bunch of them bandolera style. This one is from the site I was bitching about before, and to be fair it has apparently made it to prototype stage.

This one from Gizmag is actually real – a bit of a stretch at nine inches though.

This one’s pretty neat – for dancing apparently. I wonder if they could make one for sitting around the house in your underpants. I mean theoretically it would be more efficient to just dangle a couple of electrodes into a fermented brew of beer (which is already fermented) and pizza, and cut out the middleman. Still, I like it.

A designer security tag that replenishes your energy at the same time as you drain someone else’s with your never ending talking. This one is cool as well, and does (or doesn’t) come in a variety of fashion colours.

Here’s another one, a little less glam… any more real?

from… let me see, let me see… ah ” M2E will announce the development of an external charger later this month” – not quite real at the time of writing (last year) then… The originating site seems to have no mention of this gadget – but maybe that’s not their thing. They seem quite preoccupied with military stuff.

Eric Von Hippel having done a fair amount of research has found that around 80% of innovation is user driven – ie: people playing with actual physical things. He also says that about 3/4 of non-user-innovated products that make it to production, fail.

I hate to think of the number of products that never actually get made at all, but instead are just vapor-ware in the attention economy.

We saw this thing about this kid who made a nuke fusion reactor in his basement… from about a year ago etc:

And I was lapsing in and out of consciousness and so on, and apparently there’s a whole community of people making home made fusion reactors (that people with huge budgets have been trying to make for about 1/2 a century etc) and maybe the can and maybe the can’t or maybe they’re doing something else entirely… but me, having been immersed in a culture (of intense debate) entirely detached from any kind of objective reality for all these years… (you know, Free-Market Fundamentalists, Climate-Change-Deniers etc, conservatives. Always conservatives) and having had the whole golden mirage turn to free-falling-cardboard in front of our eyes… while the “debate” still rages… puppets still dancing after the music has stopped and the audience have gone…

… I just got this vision of these people talking and arguing and dreaming and reasoning… like perpetual-motion-machine makers thinking they can positive-think their way past the laws of thermodynamics. Tinkering and bickering… inspired by things that almost work and not deterred by things that don’t.

And then I got this vision of lots and lots of subcultures of gold-spinners – networks, who are never going to spin any gold, but it is nevertheless the driving force for what amounts to some sort of social cohesion.

And it just seemed… meaningful… to me.

Boo.com. Remember that? The last bubble? Solutions to problems that people don’t actually have. Enthusiasm. Possibility. Positive thinking. All you need is a good idea and a lot of energy!!!

This was (according to them that know) the moment that Web 2.0 died… or at least jumped the shark.

Not for me though – for me the shark jumping moment was this image on Bruce Sterling’s blog

To me it looked like it was taking the piss… like she was thinking “Oh great. A web dweeb. Can I go now?”.

But it’s not. It’s serious – it’s got talking bananas and a logo in beta and twitter mashups and TED name-dropping and an “our team” of friendly quirky people…. Choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers… etc etc…

It’s a Web 2.0 site. It’s got every single thing that might be associated with web 2.0 but with substance so thin, you can almost see through it to the brick wall at the back of the theatre. Someone’s seen that irritating movie with that kid who sees ghosts and got so carried away with enthusiasm! and energy! and positive thinking! that they’ve made a whole “startup” out of it!!!

Well… ok, it’s just a game. It’s just a bit of fun. Happy Shiney People trying to change the world for the better.

I think it’s over. And you know what? I’m kindof relieved.

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