Apr 04
Eric Franklin has created a glowing glass sculpture of a human skeleton using krypton gas.
I’ve been into skeletons lately. (Always liked glowing things.)
It’s not so much a death thing as it is an interest in the underlying architecture of humans.
And it’s just strange that something like bone is alive.
Apr 02
Epson glasses that project images on their lenses are here.
We all know Google (GOOG) is secretly building a super-advanced version of real-life Google Goggles at Google X Labs, but it looks as though Epson — the company behind printers and projectors — may have beaten Google to the punch. The Epson Moverio promises to bring the world of Android to your face, for a price …
Yes, you’ll probably look like something out Blade Runner (though not as cool as Harrison Ford), but Epson says its new Android-powered glasses are the wave of the future — and high-quality at that. Touting its projection-screen prowess, Epson calls the Moverio a “wearable display,” featuring a hand-held touchpad-type controller to interact with the on-screen heads-up display. It’s running Android 2.2, which is a bit old, but it has access to the Amazon App Store (which Epson actually recommends for use).
Sound cool? Want to try one out? You can buy one right now for the low-low price of $699. It doesn’t work as a phone, it’s Wi-Fi only and the battery charge only lasts six hours, but hey — you’ll be the talk of the town, especially if you wear them outside the house.
This is . . . Well, it is what it is.
When people talk about augmented reality they often bring up looking a building and getting historical information about it and whatnot. They often gloss over the fact that this neat-o, golly-gee-whiz info will likely be cloaked in Pepsi ads. And also — are people that interested in history?
More likely, you’ll get some sort of photoshop ap and these’ll be x-ray specs of the kind envisioned in the back pages of comic books.
Because, fucking c’mon . . . History lessons?
Like we all use our iPods to listen to lectures and audiobooks, our phones to communicate relevant shit and our computers to look up interesting information. More likely, we’re just going to see people masturbating all over the street. Or not see them. Whatever the glasses dictate.
Mar 30
This is an interview that occurred in late January and will be hitting 12 television stations and 80 radio markets in about a week via TVCOGECO. It’s for Brent Holland’s Night Fright Show.
Ryan Oakley – Technicolor Ultra-Mall via Skype from Toronto Canada. What if in the future Toronto had been turned into a huge indoor mall? But the class hierarchy is dominated by roaming gangs intent on enforcing their own version of what makes up a society. Free of authority, free of military, free of…order? Ryan draws upon the current “Occupy Movement” and a certain amount of libertarian doctrine as his prose. Would a society be better off under these circumstances, worse off because of roaming gang mentality or just same old same old? And that is the challenge of his book and our show together. We challenge each other’s conventions throughout this show and expose many shocking government policies that may already be in place and not in the future. Profound.
This is the first interview I’ve ever done of this type. (Radio, television, sound and image.) So yeah, I was a bit nervous. It should come as no surprise that I’m most comfortable in print.
But Mr. Holland was quite friendly and I think it all went off pretty well.
And cool shit about the internet, if you want to ask any follow up questions or anything like that, there’s always the comment section here.
Mar 29
Using a beam of light, MIT researchers have turned on a memory in a mouse.
Researchers chose to test a simple kind of memory — a fear memory. In one experiment, mice were put in a chamber, allowed to explore, and given a foot shock. The next time the mice were put in the same dangerous chamber, they remembered the unpleasant electric shock and froze, taking on a defensive stance. Researchers had, however, inserted a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein into the cells involved in making a memory. They then tested what happened when they turned on a light to activate those cells, without putting the mice in the same chamber. They saw the freezing behavior, as if the mice were reliving the memory.
“This is the most dramatic way to show that high cognitive phenomenon, like memory recall, can be generated, can be artificially generated by poking cells in the brain,” Tonegawa said in an interview.
This is an improvement over previous methods of making mice relive memories by providing them with a bottle of Jameson and their high-school yearbook.
Mar 24
Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today has built an argus of flying, file-sharing drones.
Their starting point for project “Electronic Countermeasures” was to create something akin to an ‘aerial Napster’ or ‘airborne Pirate Bay’, but it became much more than that.
“Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local Wi-Fi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere,” says the group describing their creation.
In short the system allows the public to share data with the help of flying drones. Much like the Pirate Box, but one that flies autonomously over the city.
“The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with,” the creators explain.
What beautiful little critters these things are. I’ve often thought that humans, depressed by a lack of aliens, will construct their own. Looks like we’ve already got some DIY UFOs.
pic nicked from here
At any moment, Hollywood will start calling these things flying cockroaches or mechanical winged rats. Their twinkling neon lights the thousand eyes of dread Pirate Mordor.
via Ian Sales
Mar 17
MIT’s Media Lab has hooked up a huge, homemade 1970s synthesizer to the Internet, allowing people to remotely control its machine parts and listen to the results. You can do both here.
Patchwerk lets you control a massive analog synthesizer from your browser, and streams the results back to you and everyone connected. The interface on this site is linked to a physical synth cabinet connected to the world’s largest homemade modular synth, currently housed at the MIT Museum. Turn a knob here, and Patchwerk will turn a motorized knob on the cabinet. If someone at the Museum grabs a knob, you’ll see it turn too.
When you first connect, you’ll be in OBSERVE mode, which means that you can hear the synth and see what the controllers are doing, but won’t be able to activate the knobs or buttons yourself. To switch to CONTROL mode, enter your name in the box at right. There can be up to 10 people acting as controllers at one time. If there are already 10 signed on, you’ll be added to a queue.
It sounds amazing. Bleeps, boops and bops. This is the sort of radio that I enjoy listening to.
If you’re into this sort of thing, you’ll really be into this thing.
Mar 16
“The White Noise Supremacists” [PDF] (from the Village Voice, 1979) by Lester Bangs is about racism in the famous New York City punk scene. It’s a touching and honest piece of writing.
I figured all this was in the Lenny Bruce spirit of let’s-defuse-them-epithets-by slinging-’em-out in Detroit I thought absolutely nothing of going to parties with people like David Ruffin and Bobby Womack where I’d get drunk, maul the women, and improvise blues songs along the lines of “Sho’ wish ah wuz a nigger / Then mah dick’d be bigger,” and of course they all laughed. It took years before I realized what an asshole I’d been, not to mention how lucky I was to get out of there with my white hide intact.
Anyone who went through a punk scene is going to recognize most of what Bangs talks about. Hopefully, they also grew up enough to reach the same conclusions.
Cause this punk thing gets glamorized an awful lot. Old farts hold it up to the kids as something to copy and admire. But anyone who actually went through a punk scene –any punk scene– can and should tell you that there always was a dark and really fucking stupid side to it.
And not in any hip n’ glamorous Sid n’ Nancy sorta way. Just in a childish and ridiculous and ignorant way. The sort of thing that should make you cringe when you get out of it.
Punk is nothing to emulate. Nostalgia kills.
Mar 15
Official Meeting of The Adventure Time Nap Gang
If you’re interested in my sleep patterns and I have no idea why you would be, I was recently interviewed by Denise Balkissoon for an article in the Globe and Mail: Is Bi-Modal Sleep as Good as Eight Straight Hours? I don’t know. Guess you’ll have to read it to find out.
Bi, straight, bedtime, eight . . . Sounds sexy.
I never thought people were interested in this sort of thing. Like, how I sleep is how I sleep. No big deal. But, if major newspapers are running this, maybe I should do a post on it sometime soon.
I’d certainly like to expand on my answers in the article.
