GENOMICON

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from Peter Root, about whom very little is known (his website is vague on this point), but who also makes amazing roller-coaster/future-blade-runner-high/low-rise slums out of transformer laminates.

Well, obviously it started with this:

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An alarm clock of sorts.

And then there was this

A magleved table. (ermmm… why?)

Which kindof morphed into this:

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and

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None of which is really my cup of tea. Apart possibly for the table, though it seems to be going to quite extreme lengths to solve a problem I don’t actually have… or at least don’t really understand.

So. Pebbles. These are cool.

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Marvelous. That’s what I want my camper van to look like.

Reminds me of the ice hotel thing up in Sweden…

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Which is so cool, I can hardly stand it, even though it is from 2006. Was designed by an Australian apparently – there’s a PDF (which is the document format of the devil) of the construction etc on his site.

Occasionally something comes along which is so obvious and essential, that it seems incredible that it hasn’t been done before.

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Although personally, I’ve been waiting (for a long time now) for barbie chess.

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Because when you look this good, it doesn’t matter that your eyelashes are on upside down.

About time – balloon clothes have been sidelined to the backwaters of fashion for too long in my opinion…

and not through any fault of their own, although they probably wouldn’t fit me etc. There are loads of them here – although nothing quite up to this standard :

Which is a bit like a Zorb made by someone who’s read about them, but who hasn’t quite grasped the basic concept.

Still, this latest lot are cool:

Although you’d have to drink through a straw etc, and could only eat things smaller than the gaps between the balloons – but maybe that’s a good thing. It is generally a mistake afterall, to eat anything bigger than your head – and something like this would relieve you of the worry etc.

And they’d probably serve a dual protective function as well – similar to what this guy was trying to achieve

or this…

Which is quite cool as well.

I think the ultimate would be wearable bouncy castles. You could have parties – where you all dress up as bouncy castles, then take acid and sit around talking about infinity etc.

That would be cool.

These are really cool:

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.

BEAM standing for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics… and meaning a strata of robotics that uses analogue circuits rather than microcontrollers to do whatever it is that they do. They also seem to mimic various biological critters (in various respects) but remind me more of really simple, single cell creatures arising out of some primordial soup… DNA learning how to walk for the first time.

This one follows light:

from Harolds Beam Bugs and being a proper community-driven type thing, they all come with instructions etc.

One of the things I like about these is that someone’s put together a taxonomy for them:

There are various “-trope” BEAMbots, which attempt to achieve a specific goal. Of the series, the phototropes are the most prevalent, as light-seeking would be the most beneficial behaviour for a solar-powered robot.

• Audiotropes react to sound sources.
  • Audiophiles go towards sound sources.
  • Audiophobes go away from sound sources.
• Phototropes (“light-seekers”) react to light sources.
  • Photophiles (also Photovores) go toward light sources.
  • Photophobes go away from light sources.
• Radiotropes react to radio frequency sources.
  • Radiophiles go toward RF sources.
  • Radiophobes go away from RF sources.
• Thermotropes react to heat sources.
  • Thermophiles go toward heat sources.
  • Thermophobes go away from heat sources.

BEAMbots have a variety of movements and positioning mechanisms. These include:

• Sitters: Unmoving robots that have a physically passive purpose.
  • Beacons: Transmit a signal (usually a navigational blip) for other BEAMbots to use.
  • Pummers: Display a “light show”.
  • Ornaments: A catch-all name for sitters that are not beacons or pummers.
• Squirmers: Stationary robots that perform an interesting action (usually by moving some sort of limbs or appendages).
  • Magbots: Utilize magnetic fields for their mode of animation.
  • Flagwavers: Move a display (or “flag”) around at a certain frequency.
  • Heads: Pivot and follow some detectable phenomena, such as a light (These are popular in the BEAM community. They can be stand-alone robots, but are more often incorporated into a larger robot.).
  • Vibrators: Use a small pager motor with an off-centre weight to shake themselves about.
• Sliders: Robots that move by sliding body parts smoothly along a surface while remaining in contact with it.
  • Snakes: Move using a horizontal wave motion.
  • Earthworms: Move using a longitudinal wave motion.
• Crawlers: Robots that move using tracks or by rolling the robot’s body with some sort of appendage. The body of the robot is not dragged on the ground.
  • Turbots: Roll their entire bodies using their arm(s) or flagella.
  • Inchworms: Move part of their bodies ahead, while the rest of the chassis is on the ground.
  • Tracked robots: Use tracked wheels, like a tank.
• Jumpers: Robots which propel themselves off the ground as a means of locomotion.
  • Vibrobots: Produce an irregular shaking motion moving themselves around a surface.
  • Springbots: Move forward by bouncing in one particular direction.
• Rollers: Robots that move by rolling all or part of their body.
  • Symets: Driven using a single motor with its shaft touching the ground, and moves in different directions depending on which of several symmetric contact points around the shaft are touching the ground.
  • Solarrollers: Solar-powered cars that use a single motor driving one or more wheels; often designed to complete a fairly short, straight and level course in the shortest amount of time.
  • Poppers: Use two motors with separate solar engines; rely on differential sensors to achieve a goal.
  • Miniballs: Shift their centre of mass, causing their spherical bodies to roll.
• Walkers: Robots that move using legs with differential ground contact.
  • Motor Driven: Use motors to move their legs (typically 3 motors or less).
  • Muscle Wire Driven: Utilize Nitinol (nickel – titanium alloy) wires for their leg actuators.
• Swimmers: Robots that move on or below the surface of a liquid (typically water).
  • Boatbots: Operate on the surface of a liquid.
  • Subbots: Operate under the surface of a liquid.
• Fliers: Robots that move through the air for sustained periods.
  • Helicopters: Use a powered rotor to provide both lift and propulsion.
  • Planes: Use fixed or flapping wings to generate lift.
  • Blimps: Use a neutrally-buoyant balloon for lift.
• Climbers: Robot that moves up or down a vertical surface, usually on a track such as a rope or wire.

I’d quite like to go cruising round youtube and find videos for each of these… but time, time…

Almost back in Theo Jansen land, but not quite… a massive wooden hexapod that you play like a piano and which drills itself into the ground.

By Paulo Nenflidio via Make

He also did this

Which is a soundscape thing with little baby Theo Jansen machines and a spider going up the wall on a string.

It’s art man. No one can tell you what to do.

OMG, she actually did it.

A while back I noted (with an opprobriously raised eyebrow) that Cati Vaucelle had designed a concept for a World of Warcraft pod, that a devotee could sit in for… well, forever, without ever having to leave.

Yes, it had a built in toilet – and if any of you recall the South Park episode about WOW, you’ll probably still feel slightly sick when it err… “touched on” that subject. I tried finding a clip on youtube, but found (instead) about 1000 clips where people had remixed South-Park as WOW to heavy metal music. Why? Why would they do that?

So anyway, back to Cati. Hmm… I thought. That sounds slight dodgy… especially as it’s been estimated that around 750,000 man-years have been spent playing WOW as it is.

So anyway, she’s actually done it:

It actually has its own little food-sachets / cooking device where you scan a bar-code thing so the cooker knows what to do…

and under the seat etc…

So there you go. More here etc

The elves seem to like it.

Ok, this isn’t about a shy fountain… but it reminds me of a shy fountain:

from : via

It’s a (proposed) bio-luminescent water-quality monitor… it floats in the water and when the water is clean, it glows radioactive-green, and when the water is not so clean, it glows blood-on-the-carpet red.

It’s a self-contained system – makes its own energy etc, and if deployed in certain areas of the world would allow us to see our pollution (or purity) from space. It doesn’t count itself as pollution obviously.

Neat idea – in fact the whole site is filled with neat ideas… the research products on the right…

A Shy Fountain by Simon Faithfull who (as far as I can gather) has actually made one. It’s a fountain that lives in a lake with movement censors… so it only plays when no one is watching. As soon as someone comes along, it stops.

Genius.

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.