Link Latte #9

In a scatty sort of mood today. Can’t concentrate. It’s too hot. I don’t know where I am. In about 2 hours, I’m going to go down to see this band that I’ve almost starting playing with and tell them I don’t want to play guitar, and I want to make a movie instead.

In the meantime… how’s the Second Guttenburg Shift coming along?

1) Where’s all the Science Fiction I was promised?

Oh Cool! it’s a… it’s a…

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! NOT ANOTHER DISHWASHER!!!

In the future, everything will be designed so it looks like something even further into the future, even though it’s not really. The Packaging Goes Deep man, The Packaging Goes Deep.

But it’s a very… singular vision of what futuristic design is actually like. It’s all blue-LEDs and streamlined shapes and see-through bits. When was the last time you saw a (new) sci-fi movie that didn’t have transparent computer screens?

Now we’re making them, and as far as I can see, the ONLY reason for this is that they’ve appeared in so many sci-fi movies. I mean a laptop where you can see through the windows doesn’t actually make it easier or better to use. Does it? It would be quite cool though. I’d get one.

This is what Sci Fi looked like 40 years ago

They actually use slide-rules in this series… because they hadn’t thought of calculators. Ten years after this was made, I bought a calculator on a watch in Hong Kong.

I mean it’s rapid rapid rapid, although for some reason (maybe because it’s so close) it seems achingly slow… but if you look at old sci-fi, a lot of the design ethics have carried through. It’s like the technology has advanced rapidly, but our future tastes have kindof stayed the sameish.

Apple bear a lot of responsibility for this – they bought the retro see-through thing back with a bit of a bang. But never mind about that, here’s some steampunk mice

2) Dude Climbing up Wall a bit like that thing off Spider Man

3) Printing in Clay

I find this one interesting because of the historical echo – the process of 3D printing is essentially the same as coil-pot making… only with much higher resolution – and the ability to make pots was one of our earliest (and therefore most important) innovations. The ability to store food/seeds meant we could stop being nomadic. Agriculture is probably the biggest/most profound innovation that humanity has ever accomplished. Everything changes when you invent agriculture. Your gods change.

4) Robots that make robots. Completely.

Cool! We don’t have to outsource labour to the 3rd World anymore.

Is there still a 3rd World? Seems like kindof an 80s concept. There are slave-cultures, crime-cultures, islands of stability, bubbles of… cancerous excess – but I’m getting the distinct vibe that everything’s gone a bit transnational.

On TV the other night were two quite good programs – Breaking Bad, and Hung. One is about a teacher who decides to become a drug dealer, the other is about a teacher who decides to become a prostitute.

As entertainment it’s not bad… it seems… realistic. These decisions almost seem like positive steps – unusual second jobs… people self-improving etc… rather than a society that the bottom has fallen out of. All this wailing of late about rates of unemployment… unemployment isn’t the problem. Cost of living is the problem. The market has driven wages down and prices up to the point where people are only just surviving.

Still robots. Cool!

5) Verizon allows Skype on Smarphones

There isn’t an iPhone app for that.

The battle of the killer-apps begins. Wasn’t there something about Google launching its own fibre network – about 1000 times faster than current offerings – as a massive STFU to telcos who are always winging about how hard it is?

This is along side tools that Google is offering so you can test if your ISP/Telco is throttling your connection:

www.measurementlab.net (from last year)
youtube speed test

And yes, my connection is about 1/3 of the global average.

6) Dude makes Snow-Slum in parent’s front yard, earns 15 minuts of fame

7) 6 Armed Hexacopter

Mind you, if it didn’t have 6 arms it wouldn’t be a hexacopter would it? Unless one of its arms were missing I suppose.

From the same place, an 8 armed Octocopter

Which I expect you could probably convert into a hexacopter quite easily. See… that’s the advantage of the self-teaching software that I was on about a couple of days back. If your dog gets hold of your octocopter and converts it into a pentacopter, it could still learn to fly.

The remaining tricopter would be a bit fucked obviously – I mean it probably wouldn’t be a copter at all – rather a mangled mess of chewed and slobbered on plastic… but genetic algorithms are genetic algorithms. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.