You are currently browsing the grinding.be archives for July, 2009.
From Engadget:
Featuring 260 dinosaur specimens, the display makes us of a virtual reality viewer — one for each person roaming round the exhibit — putting the dinosaurs at a “distance” of about 5 meters
thanks to Jonny for the tip-off!
Previously:
From pinktentacle.com:
Spotted at the International Stationery and Office Supply Fair, this eye-catching digital signage system consists of a 0.3-millimeter-thick high-luminance rear-projection film (Vikuiti Rear Projection Film developed by 3M) applied to a 3-millimeter-thick glass substrate cut into the shape of a woman. A rear projector beams video onto the film, whose microbead-arrayed surface produces a crisp, brilliant image viewable from any angle, even in brightly lit environments.
Created by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, his tattooed pigs can grace your home! The pigs are treated humanly and given sedatives before being tattooed with their intended design. A person can pick and choose which pig or skin to purchase by visiting his website.
Link and photos via nextnature.net.
Representing the next phase of prosthetic technology, osseointegrated prosthetics are faux limbs that knit themselves with the person’s bone. Since the prosthetic is attached to the bone itself, it creates a more natural movement for the wearer. Last January, we reported on the first dog candidate Cassidy, to receive the new technology. This week, National Geographic is reporting that the German shepard is doing well with his new limb.
Link and photo via nationalgeographic.com.
See also:
Thanks to LBA for the link to the update!
From New Scientist:
The interplanetary internet now has its first permanent node in space, aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The new software will make sending data from space less like using the telephone, and more like using the web. In the modern era of the web and information on demand, teams still have to schedule times to send and receive data from space missions.
…
The payload recently sent down its first science data – images of crystals formed by metal salts in free-fall – using the new programming. Its new capability has already speeded up the transfer of data back to Earth by about four times, says BioServe’s Kevin Gifford. If data is lost during a link, the system automatically transmits lost data later. Until now someone had to schedule a second attempt.
…
While the Earth-bound internet uses a protocol called TCP/IP to allow distant machines to communicate over cables, the ISS payload uses delay-tolerant networking (DTN), which is being developed to cope with the patchy coverage in space that is arises when spacecraft pass behind planets or suffer power outages.
…
The protocol could also benefit space station operations by automating space weather alerts (see Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe)
Previously:
As some of you may know, I live in the US, and today, July 4th, is the day we celebrate beer and large colorful explosions. Also, guns. There’s some rehtoric about liberty and Independence in there, too, but you’ll get as many answers about what that means as you’ll find people to ask.
However, a bit more recently (set your wayback machines for 1996) Grateful Dead lyricist, former campaign manager for Dick Cheney, cattle rancher, and Co-founder and Vice-Chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow sat down in Davos, Switzerland and wrote “A Declaration of the Independance of Cyberspace”.
What follows is one of the most famous and influential statements on the liberating potential of telecomunications technology:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
It’s easy to look back on this ancient relic of the first days of “cyberspace” and dismiss a lot of it as fantasy, wish-fulfillment and undelivered promises. Of course two months ago, the cyber-pundits that dismissed Twitter as “for Twits” hadn’t seen the most innocuous of information technologies turn, however briefly, into the voice of a national revolution.
So, almost 13 years have come and gone since the piece was written. The “Walled Garden” model of information control on the internet came, went, and is coming around again. Virtual Worlds are here, but not in the way they were invisioned back then, and dreams of immersive Virtual Reality are shifting towards visions of intergrated Augmented Reality. Whole nations seek to control the flow of information across their borders more than ever before and corporate giants seek your consent in controlling the information you have access to.
My question for you is this: Do you think that the “Declaration of the Independance of Cyberspace” is still relevant? Is the vision of a kingdom of the mind as presented there still one that can or should come to pass? Or have the shapes of the technologies involved changed the shape of what technologicaly-assisted freedom and liberty look like?
Created by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, visual proof that junk can still be useful:
Photos and link via environmentalgraffiti.com.
Thanks to Cat Vincents’ Wife-the-artist, for providing the names to the creators of the pieces.
From crunchgear.com:
Some German researchers have conjured up a kind of battery that’s less than a millimeter thin and is made by the reactive layers onto each other like a silk screen. But the most surprising bit is that they’re planning on making them on a commercial scale within six months.
Usually with cool technologies like this, it’s all being done in one guy’s lab at University of BFE, and they’ve got to get grants, talk with manufacturers, and all that stuff. But apparently this Fraunhofer team is on the fast track and they’re planning on getting these batteries rolled out, so to speak, before 2010.
The applications are limited because one battery can only produce 1.5W, but a series of those could easily power an e-book without a backlight or be woven into clothing for whatever purpose you can think of. And maybe mobile phones will get even thinner!
How thin could the next mobile phone be?
Jen Hui Liao’s Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model’s help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait.
The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.
Link and video via we-make-money-not-art.com.
The thought of being strapped into a machine and forced to draw whatever has been programmed by into the machine is an interesting ethical consideration…..
Designed by Marc Newson, for the math whiz, future debutante or whomever can afford it:
Even using “rapid” prototyping, it took French jewelry house Boucheron’s craftspeople 1,500 hours to produce Marc Newson’s fiendishly complicated Julia necklace. The fractals-based diamond and sapphire piece will debut tonight in Paris, and unsurprisingly, it will likely be “one of the most expensive necklaces Boucheron’s ever made.”
Says Newson of his design inspiration, “Fractals are fascinating, complex and rich, and gemstones really lend themselves to exploiting their beauty.”
From hipstomp at core77.com.
A young girl chills on the new glass balcony located on the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower, the United States’ tallest buillding. The balcony is 1353 feet (412 meters) in the air and juts out 4 feet (1.2 meters) from the edge of the building. This amazing and terrifying terrace opened to the public yesterday.
Link and photo via nationalgeographic.com.
Petri dishes show a riot of color and luminescence. The artist, physics professor Eshel Ben Jacob from Tel Aviv University says:
They illustrate the coping strategies that bacteria have learned to employ, strategies that involve cooperation through communication. These selfsame strategies are used by the bacteria in their struggle to defeat our best antibiotics. Thus, if we understand the mechanisms behind the patterns, we can learn how to outsmart the bacteria – for example, by tampering with their communication – in our ongoing battle for our health.
In a sense, the strikingly beautiful organization of the pattern reflects the underlying social intelligence of the bacteria. The once controversial idea that bacteria cooperate to solve challenges has become commonplace, with the discovery of specific channels of communication between the cells and specific mechanisms facilitating the exchange of genetic information. Retrospectively, these capabilities should not have been seen as so surprising, as bacteria set the stage for all life on Earth and indeed invented most of the processes of biology. As we try to stay ahead of the disease-causing varieties of these versatile creatures, we must use our own intelligence to understand them. These images remind us never to underestimate our opponent.
Link via medgadget.com.
From io9.com:
A group of Spanish researchers reported today in Science that they may have stumbled upon a substance that could become the ultimate memory-enhancer. The group was studying a poorly-understood region of the visual cortex. They found that if they boosted production of a protein called RGS-14 in that area of the visual cortex in mice, it dramatically affected the animals’ ability to remember objects they had seen.
Mice with the RGS-14 boost could remember objects they had seen for up to two months. Ordinarily the same mice would only be able to remember these objects for about an hour.
Glenn Beck, of Fox News, recently seen discussing how Osama Bin Laden can save America, wants you to read The Coming Insurrection:
Andy Folk, of ArthurMag, attended the New York launch of the book, and said
The text’s reappropriation of communism culminates in a total break from Marxism, even finding itself tracking contemporary anti-civilization arguments, attacking ecological concerns as following the logic of capitalism: “They hired our parents to destroy the world, and now they’d like to put us to work rebuilding it—to add insult to injury—at a profit.” The chapter triumphantly concludes: “As long as there is Man and Environment the police will be there between them.”
Contentious stuff. You can buy the book at MIT Press or read it online.
From Fernando Vicente Anatomias, via imgfave.com.
