The “Bubble Tree” costs about $12K and is designed by Pierre-Stéphane Dumas. (Thanks ShelterPop.)
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Tags: Pierre-Stéphane Dumas
Big enough to break your ass but good. (Thanks Crunchy.TV.)
“Lift” is an excellent 24-minute documentary from 2001 by director Mark Isaacs, in which he camps out in the lift of a residential tower in the East End of London and films the tenants as they travel vertically. Wary at first, the residents soon relax and human nature (in all its forms) emerges.
Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, gave Russia the early lead in the space race.
From Stewart Brand’s “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” published in Rolling Stone in 1972:
“After Russia’s Sputnik humiliated the US in the middle of the Fifties, America came back hard with the Mercury Program, John Glenn and all that, crash-funded through a new agency directly under the Secretary of Defense – ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency).
When the US space program was moved out of the military to become NASA, ARPA was left with a lot of funding momentum and not much program. Into this vacuum stepped J.C.R. Licklider among others, with the suggestion that since the Defense Department was the world’s largest user of computers, it would do well to support information-medium like computers.
So in 1963 a fraction of ARPA’s budget, some $5-8 million, went into a program called IPT, Information Processing Techniques, under the initial direction of Licklider and then of a 26-year-old named Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland, the developer of ‘Sketchpad’ at MIT, gave the agency its bias toward interactive graphics and its commitment to ‘blue sky mode’ re- search. The next director, Bob Taylor, then 32, doubled I PT’s . budget (while ARPA’s overall budget was shrinking) and administered a five-year golden age in computer research.
The beauty was, that being at the very top of the Defense Establishment, the agency had little Congressional scrutiny had little bureaucratic responsibility, able to take creative chances and protect long-term deep-goal projects. Alan Kay: ’90 percent of all good things that I can think of that have been done in computer science have been done funded by that agency. Chances that they would have been funded elsewhere are very low. The basic ARPA idea is that you find good people and you give them a lot of money and then you step back. If they don’t do good things in three years they get dropped – where ‘good’ is very much related to new or interesting.’
One of the accomplishments of ARPA-funded research during this time was time-sharing, Time-sharing is a routing technique that allows a large number of users to sit down ‘on-line’ with a. computer as if each were all alone with it. Naturally, timesharing was of no interest to computer manufacturers like IBM since it meant drastically morc efficient use of their hardware.”
••••••••••
Spotnik’s launch, October 4, 1957:
Sword wins.
Eyebrow gets arched, Brando gets impersonated.
Tags: John Belushi, Marlon Brando
An odd protest by the outlandish anarchist troupe Voina, a favorite of Banksy.
Voina member Alex Plutser-Sarno to Don’t Panic magazine: “Anarch-art-activism is the only lively activity in Russia. Nowadays, when even hope for democracy in Russia is ruined, painting flowers and pussy cats or making any other ‘pure’ art, lacking a socio-political content, is to support the right-wing authorities. The symbol of anarchy – a skull-and-bones – has to be painted right at the Russia’s parliament building.”
Released in 1987 in anticipation of an expected urban crime wave that never arrived in America, Paul Verhoeven’s near-future social satire nonetheless remains a sharp indictment of the practice of outsourcing justice and a reminder that weapons are made to be used.
“Old Detroit,” as it is called, is a necropolis only inhabited by predators and prey. But it is about to be bulldozed and replaced by the corporate urban center known as Delta City, courtesy of the greedy overlords at Omni Consumer Products. In order to clear the area of criminals so that they can start reaping profits, the fine folks at OCP have built a robotic crime fighter that they are about to unleash. But the bot badly malfunctions, gunning down an OCP exec. “I’m very disappointed,” says one of the corporate honchos in a hilariously deadpan line, as the employee lies dead on a conference table. But an ambitious, immoral fellow exec (Miguel Ferrer) has an answer. Create a cyborg that incorporates the best of technology with the human brain. He gets the opportunity to hatch his plot when a young cop named Murphy (Peter Weller) is shot to pieces by brutal thugs. Wires and microchips soon transform him into RoboCop. Of course, there are complications when the Singularity arrives, and the erstwhile Murphy soon becomes difficult to control.
As mentioned, RoboCop was made at a moment when crime was rising in the country and every last expert was predicting a continued spike. That never happened (and some of the theories for the decline are controversial). But the film isn’t just concerned with momentary social problems. It also deftly sends up America’s lingering Cold War mentality, which demands that we police the entire world, even when we have to outsource much of the nasty business, as we’ve done recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Greek chorus of the film is a series of parodies of TV news and commercials that comment on the action; in one of the latter, a game called “Nukem” is advertised as the kind of good family fun in which “you get them before they get you.” That’s the mentality RoboCop employs when he initially goes rogue, rationalizing that “somewhere there is a crime happening.” There always is.•
Tags: Miguel Ferrer, Paul Werhoeven, Peter Weller
Has a flashlight, too.
Masdar City’s proposed podcars have been scrapped, a casualty of the economic slowdown. From David Hill on IEEE Singularity Hub:
Sounding like something out of a Robert Heinlein novel, Masdar City’s integrated transportation plan involves four initiatives, but it was the podcar system, designed by the Italian company Zagato and developed by Dutch firm 2getthere, that held the most promise. The plan proposed a driverless fleet of 3,000 free-moving, electric vehicles that could transport 2 to 6 passengers between 85 to 100 stations, tallying up to 135,000 trips a day along preprogrammed routes. This system of podcars was basically a replacement for taxis, providing privacy to passengers without the congestion common in other urban centers. A wi-fi network would maneuver the podcars through obstacles in real time as magnets along the path continuously pull the vehicle into alignment with little variance: if one is missed, the podcar continues but if two are missed, it comes to a stop. Ultimately, the podcars were to be powered by solar panel arrays on top of buildings (which was also axed from the budget) and thermal energy-storing molten salt technology allowing the vehicles to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.•
Tags: David Hill
From Philadelphia inventor Jack Zylkin’s site: “The USBTypewriter is a new and groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence. Lovers of the look, feel, and quality of old fashioned manual typewriters can now use them as keyboards for any USB-capable computer, such as a PC, Mac, or even iPad! The modification is easy to install, it involves no messy wiring, and does not change the outward appearance of the typewriter (except for the usb adapter itself, which is mounted in the rear of the machine). So the end result is a retro-style USB keyboard that not only looks great, but feels great to use.” (Thanks IEEE Spectrum.)
Tags: Jack Zylkin
AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) displays demonstrated by Samsung in Vegas recently. They’re bendable. (Thanks Reddit.)
Gay Talese recalls elbows being bent by tipsy Timesmen. (Thanks Big Think.)
Tags: Gay Talese
"Old poison/apothecary jars."
ANTIQUES WANTED BIZARRE STRANGE WEIRD UNUSUAL WILL PAY CASH (Staten Island)
Greetings, I am a buyer and collector of fine antique items ranging from Victorian era to early Modern. I am always glad to meet and purchase items for CASH if the price is right and they fit my criteria. Please feel free to respond anytime and I will get back to you promptly for a discussion by phone or email. You can always expect the utmost courtesy and professionalism. Standard Antiques and collectible items are welcome but I SPECIALIZE in bizarre and odd items such as:
- Victorian Post-Mortem Photography
- Old Poison/Apothecary Jars
- Victorian Coffins and Urns
- Old Surgical Equipment/Devices
- Mortuary Equipment/Embalming Items
- Old Keys/Locks
- Animal Skulls Bones/Other Bones Skulls
- Books on strange subject matters
- Small Taxidermy such as squirrels/bats/cats/small dogs/reptiles
- Masonic and Secret Society Lodge Items
- Old Religious/Reliquary Items
- Early Industrial Items/Gears/
- Vintage Horror Movie Items/Masks
“Fatt Matt” Alaeddine is a 400-pound Edmonton contortionist and comedian who performs at fringe festivals. circuses and on subway platforms. (Thanks Edmonton Journal.)
Tags: Matt Alaeddine
I posted earlier about the Robot Marathon taking place in Osaka, Japan. Here is the result. (Thanks IEEE Spectrum.)
"Cheetah is designed to be a four-legged robot with a flexible spine and articulated head."
Most of you live in cheetah-free neighborhoods, but it doesn’t always have to be that way. Boston Dynamics has won contract to produce a cheetah bot. An excerpt from a Wired story:
“Boston Dynamics, maker of the Army’s BigDog robotic mule, announced today that Darpa has awarded it a contract to build a much faster and more fearsome animal-like robot, Cheetah.
As the name implies, Cheetah is designed to be a four-legged robot with a flexible spine and articulated head (and potentially a tail) that runs faster than the fastest human. In addition to raw speed, Cheetah’s makers promise that it will have the agility to make tight turns so that it can ‘zigzag to chase and evade’ and be able to stop on a dime.”
Boston Dynamics’ BigDog bot:
Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather at the 1973 awards show, via Sacheen Littlefeather, as some sort of protest in the name of Native Americans. The Academy Awards meant nothing back then, too, but the show was much more fun when there was stuff like this and Cher rocking otherworldly Bob Mackie get-ups.
mmmm
Video: marlon brando oscar award the god father Tags: oscars
Well, good aim, anyhow.
From Aaron Saenz on the Singularity Hub: “The robots are coming, the robots are coming! This spring, the San Mateo Fairgrounds will host RoboGames, the annual international event that sees robots face off in a variety of exciting competitions. Robots battle to the death in the famous RoboGames arena, shoot to win in soccer matches, fight fires in miniature mazes, and much much more.”
Tags: Aaron Saenz
You thought you were safe? No, you’re not safe. (Thanks Reddit.)
I hate everything about Star Wars, except for this. (Thanks Reddit.)
“But seriously, you should’ve seen my mother. She was wonderful. Blonde, beautiful, intelligent, alcoholic. Once they picked her up for speeding. They clocked her doing 55. All right, but in our garage?”
“The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor,” groaned Leonard Cohen not so long ago, decrying the way the powerful could cajole and pacify the masses when communications was in the hands of the few. But that was before the democratization of the media, before everyone had a channel or two hundred, before Survivors and Idols and Bachelors. Back when the playing field was still uneven and a lack of discernible talent was considered a detriment, there was a simple man named Rupert Pupkin who stormed the gates.
Pupkin (Robert De Niro), an obsessed, delusional fan of New York talk show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), lives in his mother’s basement and ekes out a tiny existence while dreaming big. He’s a peasant who sees himself as a king—the king of comedy, to be precise. Rupert hones stand-up material in his dank apartment during the night, chats with cardboard cut-outs of Liza and the like and works on one-liners. He spends the rest of the time with stalkerish autograph hound Marcia (Sandra Bernhard), who makes him seem relatively balanced by comparison.
An awkward meeting with Jerry leads Rupert to believe that he’ll soon be sharing couch space with the legendary host, but it only brings the aspiring comic rejection and humiliation. Desperate, Rupert schemes with Marcia to kidnap Jerry and keep him until he gets his ransom—the chance to do the monologue on Langford’s show. Will his moment in the spotlight transform Rupert’s life or only confirm his failure? After all, unfettered democracy guarantees neither greatness nor meritocracy, only opportunity.•
Tags: Jerry Lewis, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro
A Trenta-sized touchscreen created by the Media Merchants is currently being tested at two Canadian Starbucks outlets. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
The story of a Beijing telephone collector.
Tags: Zhang Dafang