Link Latte #4

Ok, I know it’s Wednesday etc, but I’ve gotten behind again due to loads of trauma and weirdness etc, so here’s a whole mass of randoms in the eddies and slipstreams of The Second Gutenberg Shift… this headlong race towards the building of a… great big shiny thing, with guns. Everyone wants to save the world. Everyone wants to blow stuff up. Tomorrow is sooo yesterday. Out of the way. Insects.

1) Computational Architecture.

I’ve no idea what this is. I think it’s a type of Scaletric Set – crossed with some sort of high-rise parking building designed by Escher, a bit like the ones they have in places like Swindon etc, to trap people into living there – they drive into them then can’t find their way out so eventually they give up – sell the car, move into the Holiday Inn, then get a job at the DIY Mega-Mart… which is attached to the parking “complex” so the whole thing perpetuates itself.

You think I’m making it up? Check out this roundabout is Swindon

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Those cars have been there for days, going round and round, too dizzy to remember where they live or what their names are.

Certain sorts of towns behave like sea anemones, or hydra… luring their prey in then trapping them. Massive multi-cellular organisms. It’s even been suggested that Swindon has begun to show signs of sentience… though to be honest, I’d be mildly surprised.

Anyway – the scaletric set comes from Michael Hansmeyer who also makes these…

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I’m not sure what those are either. But they’re great.

2) Sea Hippies

This is cool – it’s a bit like the thing that those scruffy ones lived on in that Waterworld – except that instead of having a massive open cesspit in the middle of it, it’s floating in one.

Sorry – that’s a dreadfully rude thing to say. The coast off Manhattan is polluted is it? I wouldn’t have thought so. Anyway – the idea is to have a floating closed-system… self-sustaining and supporting etc – as much as that can ever happen in a system that’s a part of the water-cycle of the thing that it’s floating on, but… I’m quite interested in house-boats etc, because where I come from, they don’t need any planning permission.

I think this looks well cool.

Anything with geodesic domes is automatically brilliant.

3) Hardware as platform

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This is ill-thought-through – but this week I saw the video above, lego sushi and something else that I can’t remember… but still thought “far out” about… but the point is, there is a HELL of a lot more random weirdness and creativity coming out of The Legosphere than there is from the rapid-fabrication-sphere.

This could be because Lego is a recognised “language” for getting nerd-attention. It could be because a zillion times more people are doing it. It could be for some other reason… but… I think it might be to do with RISC.

RISC being “Reduced Instruction Set Computing” – which is a philosophy to do with things being a lot faster if you build up from a small vocabulary than if you start with a massive one… in fact most programmers never even look at the entire function-set of their language. They become expert at a small subset and then build up from there.

The first thing I tried to do when I started messing about with laser cutting was to try to make a constructor set. It’s harder than it looks… and besides, it seems a little barmy – to impose artificial constraints on a really flexible medium. I mean if you can cut any shape you can imagine… why limit the number of shapes?

Why spend a huge (because yes, it is expensive) amount of money using a prototyping system to create a prototyping system?

Speed of memetic propagation, that’s why. HTML is a language that contains about 20 words. If HTML had started out as complicated as Java, the web as we know it probably wouldn’t exist.

Want rapid-fabbing to explode? Create digital lego. The “messing about” medium needs to be software because rapid-fabbed hardware is too expensive.

4) Jumpers for Wine Bottles

In case they get cold etc.

5) Moss Rings

6) Which would be even cooler, and even less practical if they were made out of bug-eating plants

But I’m a scruffy bloke who still dresses like Kurt from Nirvana. People would think I was weird. Maybe if I was a goth or something I could carry it off… but… well, that way lies madness.

6) Still, I do quite like this faery jewellery

Which comes courtesy (if memory serves) from Shelley Noble over at Halfland.

7) Paypal for iPhones

Which could be quite interesting because… well, payment by SMS was a great idea, which never really took off because of the greed of the telcos… in fact a combination of the greed of the telcoes and iphone proliferation could actually be the SMS-killer – because lets face it: they’re charging through the nose for something (sending text messages) that every second website offers one way or another for free.

8) Play-dough stuff that sticks to pretty much everything

Which seems like a good idea – but what if it gets stuck in your hair, Mmm? what then? Not so clever now are we. It took 6 years to develop this stuff, and in my experience, if it’s like chewing gum and it gets stuck in your hair, it’ll take another 6 years to get it out again, and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

I think it’s quite interesting how it’s being punted at… hackers rather than DIY people which is who that heat-moulding stuff that those people who made the robot bones out of a while back is marketed to.

So what’s the difference between hacking and DIY? Because they seem to fall either side of some sort of line.

Anyway. That’s enough for now – it all turned out to be a bit wordier than I was expecting it to.