Link Latte #6

Ok – been away for a bit but have gotten back in one piece. Feel like crap. Trying to give up coffee… which screws me up big-time. I’ll be bed-ridden for 3 days.

Anyway, this week’s Link Latte will be a little different on account of it being about 10 things that I’ve only just found today, and haven’t been storing up over the last week. So you’ll need to read slowly as this will take a little while to write.

Here we go:

1) Metal Printed 3d Puzzle thing

Which is apparently invented by Bram Coen who also invented Bittorrent. Or is it Dracula? Or both? Hard to say. It’s cool though because it is actually quite a nice shiney bit of 3D printery. Things are coming along

2) Egg House

Which looks like a cross between an egg, and some sort of shoe-tidy. Which is… um… cool, but um… maybe you’ve forgotten something?

The site has lots of other photos – the best thing about this I think is that they actually made it – and that is everything. Actual Reality… even if your girlfriend does have to sleep on a shelf… which she isn’t going to like. Oh deary me no.

3) Monocoque

Oooh…

“Monocoque’s structural skin is generated using a Voronoi pattern, the density of which corresponds to simulated loading conditions. The distribution of shear-stress lines and surface pressure is embodied in the allocation and relative thickness of the vein-like elements built into the skin. The prototype model was 3-D printed using OBJET’s Polyjet matrix technology which allows for the assignment of structural properties to multiple 3-D printed substance”

Yes, exactly. Can’t find any other references to it, but I like it etc. 3D printed exoskeletons just like proper mollusks make. It would be well cool if the printer sat on a leading edge somewhere – like a window-cleaner, allowing a building (or whatever) to self-build.

4) Seed Bombs

This has been around as a concept for ages, but at last someone has gone to the trouble of making them in a form that will give our paranoid 21st Century Western police an excuse to arrest you on anti-terrorism charges so their illustrious political leaders can justify their morally perilous existences.

These remind me (alas) of the (quite legal) cluster-bomb design – which is basically an aerial-propelled land-mine scatterer… where the bomblets are designed to look a bit like toys so kids pick them up. There’s something not quite right here.

5) Gene Gun

Which I found on a site about growing magic mushrooms. It says “The gene can be incorporated into the genome, but it doesn’t have to be for it to be expressed. So if you throw a whole lot of DNA into the nucleus of a cell, it will be expressed as long as that DNA is there (which was 3-4 days for the plant and animal cells I’ve worked on). It’s called ‘transient expression’ and it’s pretty easy. If you want stable expression, you just select for the cells that have the DNA (by introducing a herbicide/antibiotic resistance gene) and wait longer than the 3-4 days. Most of the cells will die, but the ones that integrated the DNA into their chromosomes will survive.
So it just depends on whether you want to study the gene or protein product, or if you actually want to create a transgenic organism. If it’s the former, you’d go with transient expression because it’s really easy. For plants you use a gene gun, for animal cells you use a chemical called lipofectamine.”

and as far as I can gather, it’s about getting magic mushrooms to glow in the dark – which would (I suppose) make them easier to find. At night I mean.

Only these don’t look like proper shrooms to me. I wouldn’t eat them.

6) Dope Pipe Art

Speaking of which, some of these are pretty cool

It is sort of noticeable how much art seems to grow in the cracks between what’s allowable, and what’s not.

7) Steampunk Nixie Clock

Because anything to do with Nixie Clocks is instantly cool. They glow in the dark you see. We are a simple people.

8) Robotic Orchestra

Although it does seem to have a human guitar player, playing along to it… which is (in my experience) absolutely typical of guitar players.

Also from Make Magazine, but not related in the slightest are these graffiti bone-china plates, which are incredibly cool

and speaking of which, here’s a Starry Starry Night Cake

9) Nanotech LEDs

Ok – this is really just an excuse for a cool picture… apparently new LED palettes are being created using nanotech… have you noticed how nanotech seems to have become a catch-all description for pretty much anything emerging from this materials revolution we’re in? I thought Nanotech was to do with tiny little robot things that devour the whole universe?

10) See through laptop

So obviously CES or whatever was on last week and a load of new inventions were showcased… and I’ve managed to avoid all of them, except this one – which I find interesting because it’s one of those things that we like because we’ve seen it in Sci-Fi movies, but which in real life, possibly isn’t that useful.

Because… it may look so cool that we can hardly stand it… but look at the screen you’re looking at now (ok, you already are). Imagine if you could see through it. Would that make it easier to use? I doubt it. They talk about using them as head-up displays for cars… yup. They’ve just banned mobile phone usage in NZ (catching up with the rest of the world) on account of people getting distracted and crashing all the time. I can’t imagine this would help terribly. It’s purely about looking cool rather than being useful.

Could be good for glasses though – so you can do that augmented reality thing without looking like a total prannet.

—

Ok – that’s it for now… Only 1/2 way really. God damn things move fast. I wish they’d hurry up though.