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.

I’m kindof stuck on the notion of trying to make 3d things from 2d things.

Pretty skilly scalpelwork required, but the genome is passed via various vector-formats, and there’s this assumption that you “might” cut it out with a laser cutter, which are still a bit on the pricey side last time I looked… although there are some pretty cool CNC paper cutters as in

“The Personal Fabrication Revolution is being led by Hockey Moms” for the princely (or princessly) sum of $399, which less face it possums, ain’t as much as it used to be.

Useful for anything? Not yet, but that’s not the point. The point is that It’s Not Watching Television.

This is an… artefact/symptom/flower… of a freeing up of brain-power, and a networking of this newly freed brain-power. We are 50% of a new symbiote, that (I read somewhere) is currently using about 5% of the planet’s energy. The benefits of this (for we paper-reading herds of haunted meat) aren’t nothing. Or merely spreadsheets and tetris. It’s tying us down, it’s freeing us up. Sucking us in, and in exchange for our every last syllable of recorded time, it’s giving us a Crowd-Sourced Renaissance.

And Junk Cogs.

What could possibly go wrong?

An instructable for refining nepetalactone, the active ingredient in catnip.

If life wasn’t difficult enough already:

from Robot Room

Although I would’ve thought it might be better to have the lens focus on a copper nail or something – which you can then use as a soldering tip. What’s the ideal temp? 700 degrees?

from The Fruit Computer Laboratory

Marvellous. Reminds me partly of this edible Joule Thief:

from oskay@flickr

And this thing that turned up recently about programmable food – a bit like the Star-Trek thing… made out of Algae (which is making something of a comeback on account of it being the fastest way of turning sunlight and CO2 into physical bio-stuff)

Obviously someone’s seen one of those hamster balls and decided that it would make a nice lampshade, but with flies instead of a hamster, which is fair enough… one of the lampshades at my place is constantly filling up with moths etc, so why not get them to do something useful?

I once saw this bit of art in the National Gallery in New Zealand where someone had created a glass cube about the size of a shower, put a tractor seat in it, then put an entire bee-hive on the tractor seat… with tube to the outside world so the bees could go out and do bee stuff.

The fly thing is a bit like that, but it moves around and would probably be easier to live with… but not as easy to live with than… a picture of it say.

Ok, this one isn’t so much an insect controlled robot, as an jewelled dragonfly that flutters its wings when you turn a handle. One day these things will be the future of modern warfare. They’ll flit about the place spying on people and poisoning them.

Ok, this isn’t really an insect controlled robot either – rather a robot controlled insect. You could connect it up to one of those psychic hats I was on about earlier and use it for all sorts of devious purposes.

Actually, come to think of it, I can’ think of a single non-devious purpose that this could be put to… but maybe someone else can, and maybe that’s the point. The cross-pollination of ideas. It’s a flower thing.

(edit)

Brazillian Hamster Balls.

New Zealand Hamster Balls:

Hamster ball painting :

Ok, this post should really have been about hamster balls. Whatever.

Who is probably mates/enemies with The Face Twitching Guy

I kindof know how he feels though. If your girlfriend’s being unreasonable. If you can’t find your keys. If Scotland loses to England again… sometimes just sitting in the driveway and mindlessly reving your engine or just lying down on the pavement and going to sleep, doesn’t really express what you feel. So what else is there to do?

om nom nom

Is this basically just an excuse to post this picture of a hamster? No. Rubbish etc.

Ok. Vitamin Parts… lets say you were trying to make a completely self-contained self-replicating system that was capable of reproducing itself (ok, it gets energy, materials and initial programming from its environment, but what do you want? A caveat to the laws of thermodynamics?)… like a reprap machine for example. If you managed to get it to a point where it could 100% self-reproduce, with no outisde help, then it would be said to have “closure”.

At the moment the reprap machines are currently at about 60%? 80%? I don’t know. Here’s a picture of an earlyish one

and you can see there are various bits like wires and motors etc that it can’t make itself, and which have to be supplied by helpful humans.

These are know as vitamin parts.

So if say (and I mean this hypothetically), you wanted to make a self-sustaining hamster biosphere, like this one where it can shred its own paper…

… then the hamster weel would be a vitamin part. Actually the hamster itself is a vitamin part as well, unless you have a suitably large gene-pool etc…

Ok, it’s not really a terribly good example, and perhaps the whole thing was just an excuse to post that first picture, but still. You’ve learned something etc. Stop your moaning.

It’s like Dancing with the Stars cross with Robot Wars. Probably.