GENOMICON

This is quite a neat idea… that could go in about a million different directions given the chance.

A while back I went on about the DRM backlash the Spore created for itself….

… but we appear to be over that now, and a great big list of amazing Spore creations has turned up on replicatorinc.com.

Which is quite remarkable given that this thing (as far as I can gather) started out as a platform for the crowd-sourced creation of cutsey wutsey little fowest cweatures.

As noted by Replicatorinc, imagine what will happen with this level of imagination is connected up to automated fabbing facilities… this is beginning to happen… but it’s still a very labour-intensive process.

How to make a remote control basketball

for people who can’t be arsed with all that silly running about nonsense.

Further on, there’s this:

Which is a site that will turn you into a cartoon robot doll, a bit like a cross between a Stepford Wife and a cabbage patch doll… and it runs on Windows XP!!! and who here can honestly say they’ve never needed one of those?

Lastly but not leastly, and further to my theory… that you haven’t truly arrived until you’ve been rendered in Lego…

via sneakermaniac, from gizmodo

This site is really cool

It’s like instructables - but a lot simpler, with a lot of general scientific building blocks/principles turned into toys etc.

This stuff has so much more imaginative potential than the mountains of injection-moulded crap that turns up in Toysrus. It would be cool to have a similar site which has building blocks of really useful technologies – like using plastic bottles to sterilise water etc. Kindof like a Lifehacker style knowledge-sharing site for the billions of people on this planet who don’t have access to clean water etc.

Well people have been doing it for years of course… what with Crufts dog show, and those little yapper-type dogs (who are bastards) and the RSPCA finally coming out and saying that they’re boycotting Crufts from now on because the whole thing is a freak show and some of the specially bred variations are possibly a bit cruel…

(from)

But the point is we’ve been making toy animals for years. I’m quite interested in the notion that when a new technology breaks, it quit often turns up as toys first… so naturally this caught my eye… the first geneticaly engineered pets:

(Glofish : Wikipedia)

Which look like this, pre-tinkering

And the Jazz-Purists of the animal world are already expressing concern over the toyification of animals… as per this article from a hermit-crab blog with regards painting/modifying their shells which alerted me to the fact that there’s actually a severe hermit-crab shell-shortage (christ, is anything going right on this planet?) and a voluntary ban that many pet stores impose on “painting fish“, ie: injecting them with dye, which sounds slightly insane to me and the sort of thing Hitler would do, but there you go.

The toyification of weapons, the toyification of animals. I think we need a subtle redesign of our ethical systems – not that I have a problem with creating new species per se, but I think that the revolution in human dignity that has taken place over the last couple of hundred years needs to extend to animals.

An interesting video of the process required for making 3D prints of World of Warcraft characters.

Very labour intensive, and very hands-on. Still, early days yet etc.

My brother accidently gave himself one of these for christmas…

A little baby planelet, which was actually fairly big, but dead simple and as cheap as chips albeit fairly expensive chips. It’s radio controlled etc. He was telling me about this guy he knows who put a gyroscope on his baseball cap and coupled it to a little camera on the plane so you can look around while you’re up there. You can look down and see yourself flying etc. Marvellous.

So that’s what I want for christmas (and not socks). I want one of those planes, with a camera like this on it:

via gizmag

Yes – it is bi-focal or whatever you call it. Stereoscopic… whatever, it has depth-perception because you use it with glasses like these:

via gizmag

And controlled with one of these. Mounted on some sort of hat so the camera follows your head movements. It would be better to get some sort of eyeball tracking thing, but I haven’t really looked into how to do that.

This would be mounted on one of these:

Which is a mind contol device which (by the looks) you could use to control a plane a hell of a lot easier than those knob things that RC planes usually have.

So there you go. That’s what I want. One of those… then just give me a way of crapping on cars and I’d be the happiest guy in the world.

(from : Flickr : fdecomite)

I’ve noticed that when a new idea turns up, often it’s immediate use is as a toy… which I think is a useful creative path – “play” gives people a consequence-free medium in which to experiment with things. I went on about Bristlebots a while back, apropos of nothing… just thought they were a neat idea and that it was cool how the bristlebot meme propagated.

Now it appears they may have a useful application – in a theoretical sense at least… as a means for launching spaceships. I kid you not. There has long been talk about the use of a space-elevator for escaping earth’s gravity – basically a long cable that is held in place by the centrifugal force of the earth spinning. There was always a problem however with how to propel the car/ship.

It turns out that a guy from the EU Space Agency has demonstrated a possible method – using bristlebots… but instead of vibrating the bristlebot, you vibrate the thing it’s standing on – in this case the cable.

So there you go.