Forget waiting for ET to call -- the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia.

Professor Paul Davies, from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, believes a cosmic greeting card could have been left in every human cell.

The coded message would only be discovered once the human race had the technology to read and understand it.

Writing in New Scientist magazine, Davies said the idea should be considered seriously.

For more than 40 years astronomers have been sweeping the skies with radio telescopes hoping to catch a signal from an alien civilisation.

So far the search has been in vain. But Davies believes it is wrong to assume that extraterrestrials who may be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us technologically will have chosen to communicate by radio.

FROM BEV: the referenced New Scientist article is here, dated sept 18, 1999.

Pitcairn Island - midway between Peru and New Zealand in the South Pacific - is home to the descendents of the HMS Bounty mutineers and local Polynesians, with a fascinating history of British intervention and governance that continues to this day.

Of the less than 50 current residents, seven men (including the mayor) are now on trial for sexual abuse, ranging from indecent assault to the rape of a five-year-old girl. (via)

[....]

And so, leaving the case of the five-year-old aside, the real question here is who should be able to legislate the behaviours of the Pitcairners? Should it be a far-away people whose values and norms are based on different histories and situations? Or should it be the local people, with their intimate knowledge of centuries of life as one of the world's most isolated communities?

The history of imperialism and colonialism tells us that the conquering peoples most often impose their cultural norms on the conquered. Wars of independence - indeed all revolutionary acts - are fought not least because people want autonomy. They want to feel in charge of their own lives, want their own values to guide them.

When - if ever - do we get to impose universal morals or laws? And who gets to decide what they are?

FROM BEV: that's what i thought too when i first read about this.

Digit devised an interactive installation, MotoGlyph for the Miami's M3 Festival (sponsored by Motorola.)

Guests could write on panels (each have their own sound effect) with a 'virtual spray can' and the movements were tracked via ultrasound, then projected onto glass panels, creating a virtual graffiti wall and the sensation of writing in 'light'.

Users created thus their own digital signature or illustration upon the wall from which the variables of the marks and strokes were translated into the author's own sound and animation.

Participants could then go to the MotoGlyph website to download an MP3 of their unique ringtone to their mobile phone.

Motorola plan to tour the project throughout the States over 2004, specific locations tbc.
The website has lots of pics and videos.

Via del.icio.us/tag/technology.

JAPANESE SCHOOLS are experimenting with a scheme that involves giving children location computer chips.

According to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, the kids carry chips that have tiny antennae and can be traced by radio.

Electronic giant Fujitsu is providing the chips which send signals to receivers at school gates which records when a student enters or leaves.

Women have four G-spots - according to a new book.

Human biologist Desmond Morris believes there are three more super-sensitive zones in the upper part of the vagina.

He has dubbed them the U-spot, C-spot and A-spot in his new book The Naked Woman, says The Sun.

Transmaterial is a catalog of materials, products and processes that are redefining our physical environment. Edited by Blaine Brownell, the project started as a product of the week newsletter sponsored by the Seattle based architecture firm NBBJ. This incredibly comprehensive guide is as beautiful as it is informative. The entire 186 pages is available at transstudio.com as a downloadable .pdf file.

Gathering of the Tribes - Sousveillance
Call for Submissions

"We seek creative works exploring how individuals and cultures artistically respond to and represent our world under surveillance. New media performance emphasizing the importance of public reflection on ubiquitous surveillance and sousveillence is encouraged, as well as essays, short stories, poetry and visual works that assist in defining the ideals of human centeredness in a mechanical and monitored world."

Hmm. perhaps I will submit my percolating critique of sousveillance...

Legalizing Torture

"The provision Rep. Markey referred to is contained in Section 3032 and 3033 of H.R. 10, the "9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act of 2004," introduced by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL). The provision would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to issue new regulations to exclude from the protection of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, any suspected terrorist - thereby allowing them to be deported or transferred to a country that may engage in torture. The provision would put the burden of proof on the person being deported or rendered to establish "by clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured," would bar the courts from having jurisdiction to review the Secretary's regulations, and would free the Secretary to deport or remove terrorist suspects to any country in the world at will - even countries other than the person's home country or the country in which they were born. The provision would also apply retroactively."

Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., Susan M. Hughes and Franco Dispenza have found that people with sexy voices get more sex and have more symmetrical body shapes.

In "Ratings of voice attractiveness predict sexual behavior and body configuration," published in the September issue of Evolution and Human Behavior, published by Elsevier, Susan Hughes, Franco Dispenza, and Gordon Gallup of the University's department of psychology tested 149 men and women by having them listen to recorded, neutral voices counting from 1 to 10. They were then asked to rate the anonymous voices on a scale from "very unattractive" to "very attractive." The results were compared to surveys and morphological measurements taken among the speakers. Researchers discovered that people whose voices are judged to be attractive tend to have sexual intercourse at an earlier age, have more sexual partners than those with voices rated less attractive, and are more prone to sexual infidelity. They also have more sex partners among people involved in other relationships.

"In short," Gallup said, "ratings of voice attractiveness are correlated with promiscuity in both men and women."

The fact that people with more symmetrical bodies have sexier voices is especially interesting. This suggests that the quality of development of a fetus translates into not just a more attractive symmetrical appearance but also into a throat shape that creates more pleasing vocal sounds.

The full paper is on-line.(PDF format)

STRANGEco - purveyors of the peculiar.

(via)

U.S. bases of the future are supposed to be self-sustaining. But they produce over 7 pounds of waste per day, per soldier. And the Pentagone even adds that a whole heap of "personnel, fuel, and critical transport equipment are needed to support the removal and disposal" of such waste.

So Darpa has just given "gene synthesis" company DNA2.0 a grant to
give the junk a second life, by turning the plastic waste into fuel.

read details , via defensetech

Designer: Designers: Dirk Rutten & Jeroen Kascha for NXT design

The Jelly-light is a massive light sculpture.

The light-source is fitted inside a generator fitted with an energy-saving MHR150 watt bulb. Light from the generator flows into the Jelly-light through optic fibers infused in transparent rubber.

Add an optional colour wheel, with a range of colours, and a programmable system, and you can create a huge assortment of dynamic color schemes, a lightshow hanging from your ceiling.

Available in diameters of 1.5 to 3 meters.

This means that all sorts of manufacturers can easily and inexpensively incorporate the attractive properties of noble metals into their products. Imagine shoes or socks that are odor-resistant, mascara that resists transmitting infections, and food packaging materials that increase food storage life on the shelf or in the home.

FROM BEV: if you can't wait for nanotech, you can still wear anti-stink, anti-microbial socks and underwear that has been available for years. those Pearl Izumi folks are so darn hi-tech! Marmot also offers antimicrobial clothing with "Infinity Base Layer P-520".

This weekend saw the UK's first consumer cosmetic surgery exhibition. The Body Beautiful show aimed at making shopping for surgery almost as easy as choosing furniture at homes and garden shows.

What was surprising was the number of girls barely out of their teens asking about breast implants and skin procedures. And while some visitors were clearly wealthy, the majority were normal middle-class women.

Body Beautiful spokesman Adam Taylor said: "The business is booming exponentially in the UK. We are following in the footsteps of America."

From BBC News.

If you're brave enough, try to look at Streamor "A Digital Window to the OR for Physicians, Trainees, and Patients. Featuring Cutting Edge Open and Endoscopic Surgery From the World's Leading Medical Centers."

Via Unmediated.

Even more interesting is the article in The Guardian asking whether we will use the advances in plastic surgery techniques to remake our identities at will.

* in case you wondered, the woman on the picture is NOT a photomontage, she's Michaela Romanini. Her niece is marrying into the family of Silvio Berlusconi! I love Italy.

Cell towers camouflaged as trees. Photos by fraudfrond.com.

Related: Cell ID - the reality

See also: Big Tree Shaped Cell Antenna & Cell tower camouflage artists just want to blend in

I've been struggling with Pierre Klossowski's book on Nietzsche, 'Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle', and his conception of the conflicts between the impulses of the body and consciousness.

An example?

We have an impossible sexual longing for young girls leading to an art of bodies, which re-creates a sexual passion that invents new desires.

Hans Bellmer,

Little girls are not sexually available for middle aged men in our society. So what male artists do is envision and manufacture art works (eg., dolls) in their image. These can then be probed with aggressive fingers and captured rapaciously by a conscious male gaze.

What results is dread, an inner turmoil of conflicting desires, and twisted longing. It is not right to desire young girls nor to desire to mutiliate their bodies. So Bellmer's expression of these obsessional desires in images is kept hidden, only shown to a few surrealists in the art world.

This all changed when the internet was invented and porn was everywhere.

I do not want to give this a psychoanalytic interpretation of repressed unconcious desire versus the ego as moral conscience. I want to consider it in terms of an obsessional image produced instinctively by life of the impulses. An example of such an image is Bellmer's dolls:

continued at Junk for Code... Art in the buff   permalink

In Swindon (UK), gallery owner Kevin Money is offering a 25% discount for culture vultures cheeky enough to visit the Bodyline exhibition in the buff.

Encouraging customers to strip off is a way of helping them to experience the art in a more profound way, Mr Money said.

"We're hoping that people will come in, look at the paintings and say `I've got a body, I'm not ashamed of it'."

Bodyline, a study of the naked male and female form, is on show at Gallery 39 in Old Town. If you're around...

Sky News.

FROM BEV: feralchildren.com is a resourceful site about children that have been isolated, confined, and raised by animals. two films based on true stories that i really enjoyed are: Mockingbird Don't Sing and Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage. more are described here

Army-backed researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are working to develop a paint that would change color in a biological or chemical attack -- and might even kill off the deadly agents, too.

Last year at this time I was in Newcastle, Australia at the ElectroFringe festival! This year’s event, titled “Replicate, Automate, Infiltrate", is chock full of cool projects and visitors including Eric Singer’s Lemur Bots, Robert Praxmarer’s (T)error installation, and Aki Onda’s Cassette Memories which is comprised of an ongoiing collection of found audio samples and layered tracks. Also featured will be some interesting sound workshops with Ian Birse & Laura Kavanaugh who do live sampling projects in public spaces and recently worked on Instant Places which involves “locally gathered audio and video is transformed via improvisations in a created environments. Each project can be thought of as an evolving portrait or journal that is specific to the conditions surrounding it, while allowing indeterminate and personal forces a role in the outcome.” Overall the event looks great - and hopefully this year there will be wifi!

The UPS guy delivered my Sinulator the morning of the day I was giving a party. I signed, sent him on his way and returned to my preparations. It wasn't until hours later, draped around the room with about 20 friends, that I remembered my new toy.

The Sinulator is a device that lets you connect a sex toy to your computer so that other people can control it for you over the internet. After announcing to the room that I had one of these, I really had no choice but to open the box and pass the thing around....

A German telecommunications company said on Tuesday it is developing the first mobile phone that will alert users when their breath is bad or if they are giving off offensive smells.

The phone will use a tiny chip measuring less than one millimeter to detect unpleasant odors, a spokeswoman for Siemens Mobile said. A research team in the southern city of Munich is developing the device using new sensor technology.

"It examines the air in the immediate vicinity for anything from bad breath and alcohol to atmospheric gas levels," the spokeswoman said. "Some people take smelling good rather seriously."

"A Sabine Parish man is accused of fowl play, authorities said. Timothy Garner, 35, of the Florien area is suspected of having sex with a chicken. Garner was arrested Thursday after being caught in the chicken house, Florien police Chief Herman R. Love said. Earlier this week, a West Monroe man was arrested accused of having sex with a pig. Ouachita Parish Sheriff's deputies arrested Austin Gullette, 45, after his sister says she caught him with one of her three pigs. On Thursday, the chickens' owner heard the animals making a commotion and saw headlights outside. A neighbor also heard the commotion and found Garner inside the chicken house, Love said... After being brought in for questioning at the Sabine Parish Sheriff's Office, Love said Garner admitted to having sex with the animal." —The Town Talk (US)

FROM BEV: ok, so what, right? there's even a name for this behavior, bestiality. but what i actually find really interesting and funny is that PETA is sueing this man for sexually assaulting a chicken. "'Studies show that offenders who commit bestiality often go on to commit sex crimes against humans. The community should follow this case closely because anyone capable of this kind of cruelty poses a definitive risk, not just to animals, but to fellow human beings,' says PETA Casework Division Manager Martin Mersereau." this is insteresting because what was probably just a fetish is now labeled as rape if you think like an animal rights activist.

So Hideto Tomabechi, one of the guys who helped deprogram members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, has started selling a ringtone that he says will make your breasts grow larger just by listening to it, something which should make it very popular with the ladies (guys, you’re gonna want to carry some earplugs just in case). Fortunately there are customer testimonials in case you were worried about this thing being legit or not, and Tomabechi says it’s really simple, that he just uses sounds that “make the brain and body move unconsciously. It’s a technique involving subliminal effects,” that’s like “positive brainwashing.” If getting all busty through a ringtone isn’t your bag, he also ringtones on the way that’ll improve your memory, make you more attractive to the opposite sex, cure baldness, and help you give up smoking. Ringtones, man, ringtones.

If you think Earth is a mess, consider the turmoil in the constellation Hydra, where astronomers have spotted two monster galactic clusters slamming together in one of the biggest collisions ever recorded.

The cosmic smash-up poses no danger to Earth – it is located about 800 million light-years away and the galaxies involved tend to speed by each other without crashing – but our own Milky Way could be on a similar collision course in a few billion years.

Melbourne-based Iatia has been given $2.7 million by the Australian Defence Department to fund development of a military spy camera that could be used by troops on the ground or from helicopters to see through trees, cloud, fog, smoke and dust storms and allowing soldiers to distinguish between camouflaged targets and vegetation.

The technology, called Quantitative Phase Imaging, uses a sophisticated camera that captures three images simultaneously through a single lens. Images thus resolved from between the particles making up fog, smoke, and dust storms are formed into a single picture of the hidden target.

Further research and field trials will now be carried out to develop an operational camera capable of working over a range of about a kilometre.

The technology also has commercial application in industry, science and medicine.

From The Age, via Slashdot.

FROM BEV: this is AMAZING! you must see the videos. nice one, regine! :-)

Theo Jansen seems to be one of those fantastic crazy Dutch. He builds mobile sculputural creatures of plastic yellow tubes.

The walking skeletons are powered by wind energy. Eventualy he wants "to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives."

The videos are totally wild!

The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is 4.70 metres tall, but can be set into motion by one person. Because of its height it catches enough wind to start moving.

It is equipped with passenger seats and can be used for transport. However, "due to the fact that one must wait until strong wind comes from the right direction, living quarters must be made in the animal to make travel agreable."

Just don't miss the video.

Via del.icio.us/tag/robot.

Gold bodysuits, giant inflatable phalluses and an orangutan mascot for gay divorce. With a new book and movie, the Yes Men prepare to take their activist performance art to a whole new level. Photo Top inset: Andy Bichlbaum as "Granwyth Hulatberi" appearing on CNBC. Background: Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano in "The Yes Men." Bottom inset: Bonnano crouching behind Newt Gingrich at the RNC. FROM BEV: i'm excited to see the premiere of this tonite.

A bizarre marine reptile used a neck nearly twice the length of its body to capture its prey, 230 million years ago. Fish saw only its small head in murky waters and, when they came too close, the animal quickly expanded its formidable throat to suck in its dinner.

The astonishing length of the neck of Dinocephalosaurus was revealed when a near complete skeleton was unearthed in China by Chun Li of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, in Beijing. The length took researchers by surprise, since the reptile had previously been known from only a fossil skull.

Rats equipped with radios that transmit their brainwaves could soon be helping to locate earthquake survivors buried in the wreckage of collapsed buildings.

Rats have an exquisitely sensitive sense of smell and can crawl just about anywhere. This combination makes them ideal candidates for sniffing out buried survivors. For that, the animals need to be taught to home in on people, and they must also signal their position to rescuers on the surface.

In a project funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, Linda and Ray Hermer-Vazquez of the University of Florida in Gainesville have worked out a way to achieve this.

A "Science & Fiction Symposium " will be held in in San Francisco on September 29 - October 2, 2004

Four days to analyse the relationship and mutual influence of science and fiction, of hard fact and imagination.

Swiss and American scientists, science-fiction writers, and astronauts will talk about four topics: Automatons, Autonomous robots, Human Augmentation and Mars in Science and Fiction.

The exhibition "Science Fiction - Technology Fact", on loan from the House of Elsewhere, will be on display throughout the symposium.

To get more details and register: ScienceLink.
From World Changing.
Image.

PARIS - A French urban climber who calls himself "Spider-Man" scaled a 59-story Paris office building Wednesday with his bare hands and without using any ropes.

Alain Robert took less than 45 minutes to climb the nearly 700-foot-tall Montparnasse Tower building, gripping the metal girders on his way up. At the top, he waved to a small crowd that gathered on the ground, some shouting "Allez, Alain!", or "Go, Alain!"

"This is a bit long," Robert, 42, said of his climb. "There are some metallic rails which are a bit slippery. It's difficult to stick the feet inside so it's a bit uncomfortable. I mean, I have to climb quite quickly. I have to be able to keep the rhythm. And today it's windy, it's a bit cold."

The hypnotic, hallucinatory "Story of the Eye", Georges Bataille's 1928 novella of teenage sexual excess and transgression, might well be considered the bible of alt porn; it's curious, then, that some art-school grad-turned-porn auteur didn't tackle a film version long ago. But by all the accounts we've read so far, Andrew Repasky McElhinney's pansexual adaptation (which opens this week at Pioneer Two Boots Theater in NYC's East Village) was worth the wait: says Dave Kehr in the New York Times today, "This is transgression in a literal sense, an act of aggression that Bataille would no doubt have appreciated. This is not a movie for passive consumption, but a film that bites back."

Exploring the Temptation to Look (and to Look Away)
(review @ NY Times; registration required)
Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye
(review @ unitshifter.com)
Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye
(official site @ armcinema25.com)
Read: Story of the Eye
(Georges Bataille Electronic Library @ supervert.com)
Order: Story of the Eye
(Amazon)

Hey, Andy Warhol called and he wants his 15 minutes back. A Japanese artist who makes giant pop art prints of web pages just cashed in by selling a bunch of them to Google. If you want to do something like this, there a few apps that let you print wall sized images (or wall murals, as those crazy interior designers call them) from multiple pages—just don’t cover your wall with anything from this site.

It’s nice to see so much going on in the field technology for the disabled today, kind of makes you think mankind is actually doing good or something amongst all the embroilments and political turmoil. An Israeli company has developed a $200 cellphone for the lip-reading deaf; the caller’s voice is electronically mimed by a character on screen, whose lips can be read. Well hot damn, why didn’t we think of that? Guess we’ll just have to put all our brainpower to work figuring out how to make the thing expressively swear or spit invective, kind of like with those awful Oddcast ads.

If you flew on a plane in June, your personal information is about to be dumped into the Department of Homeland Security's new terror-screening database.

"The Transportation Security Administration will use passenger data from June 2004 from 77 domestic carriers to test the Secure Flight program, which is designed to check airline passenger names against a centralized terrorist watch list," Defense Tech pal Ryan Singel writes.

The convergence of video games and neurofeedback are improving cognitive-processing capabilities across a wide variety of mental illnesses. Two companies leading this market are Epoch Innovation who provides neurogaming tools for dyslexia and CyberLearning Technology who is using neurofeedback-enhanced versions of off-the-shelf videogames like Ratchet & Clank to help children with attention-deficit disorder.

Neurogaming isn't just for kids, adults can benefit from neurofeedback as well. For example, The Wild Divine Project uses (bio) sensors attached to the fingers to monitor skin conductance and heart-rate variability via the computer's USB port.

At the cutting edge of research into the benefits of neurogaming is UCSF's Sophia Vinogradov. Dr. Vinogradov is investigating how computerized training might help people with schizophrenia learn new thinking and problem-solving skills. Her breakthrough work on neuroscience-guided remediation of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia was recently awarded a $1.1M grant from the NIMH.

It seems that ever since Steven Johnson shared how neurofeedback opened up new ways to understand his implicit reactions to daily events, the neurofeedback meme has been growing stronger. As venture capital continues to pour into companies using neurofeedback to improve software productivity and increase financial trading profitability it is important to realize that even these "non-medical efforts" will translate into more effective neurofeedback solutions to treat mental illnesses. This is the neurotechnology industry at work.

FROM BEV: i have the Wild Divine game and though i support their efforts, i have to admit that the game is very buggy. it's already frustrating for attention-deficit me to play a game that requires patience. i mean, how many times do i have to juggle glowing spheres ("mentally") in order to get to the next level?? clearly, they have to do more quality assurance testing.

Human cells can synthesize the painkiller morphine, a finding that could provide new pharmacological targets for treating pain.

With fall approaching, now is not the time of the year most folks are thinking about grass. But Monsanto and Scott are... they're developing what's being called the world's first bioengineered grass.

FROM BEV: those pitiless folks at Monsanto never give up, do they? but then again, of course they'll do anything to sustain their best-selling product, Roundup. ah....brings me back to the BBB pie-slinging days, when they also pulped the Sept/Oct 1998 issue of the Ecologist, titled "The Monsanto Files," which profiled the revolutionary products Roundup, Agent Orange, Bovine Growth Hormone, and PCB.

A GRIEVING Australian widow has had her husband's ashes sewn into her breast implants, a British newspaper has reported. Sydney woman Sandi Canesco, 26, took the bizarre step after her new husband Dustin was killed in a car accident, downmarket tabloid the Daily Star said. "It dawned on me that if I carried Dustin's cremated remains in my breast implants, I'd never really have to part with him at all, because then he and I would be one and the same," the paper quoted Canesco as saying, under the headline "Dust to bust".

Speakers as art. Aesthetics and sound quality are combined in the "loudspeakers and subwoofers concealed behind striking fabrics and artwork" made by Artcoustic. Designers now have another canvas for the handiwork, "positioning loudspeakers need no longer be at the expense...

More men than women have failed to reproduce in each generation.

Men and women differed in their participation in reproduction, the researchers report. More men than women get squeezed out of the mating game. As a result, twice as many women as men passed their genes to the next generation.

In their gallery / shop space in Paris, Surface 2 Air features clothes and objects that nicely blend art and fashion. Each of these woven belts, for example, look great as individual items, but when presented side by side form a single image. As far as I'm concerned, this is a most genius approach to creating limited editions. Further, each belt is one of a kind because of where the pattern lands on the piece.

Surface 2 Air
46, Rue de L'Arbre Sec

David Pescovitz:
In the new issue of Popular Science, Jessican Snyder Sachs has an interesting and well-written article about virtual autopsies as a permanent record for pathologists. Michael Thali and the Virtopsy research team at the University of Bern, Switzerland use computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to create full-body scans of murder victims.

Besides being a bloodless approach to an otherwise messy job, the digitally preserved bodies of the Virtopsy Project have the added benefit of permanency. “Murder victims have the unfortunate habit of decomposing,” Thali notes.

Urinals in some pubs and hotels across New Zealand have now adverts that are heat-activated and display a message when hit by warm liquid.

They say either: "If you drink then don't drive you're a bloody legend" (picture of a taxi) or: "If you drink then drive you're a bloody idiot" (picture of a wrecked car).

The Land Transport Safety Authority decided to run the campaign because every year, more people are being killed in drink-driving crashes, they also declared: "This will definitely be a 'moment of truth' experience for any bloke who goes to the toilet in one of the participating pubs."

Via New Zeland Herald, via Adrants.

According to David Turner, president of the Indoor Billboard Advertising Association, the growing use of advertising in restrooms is due to the fact that the audience is captive to its biological needs.

Most marketers include bathroom ads as just one component of a plan that includes more traditional media. But for certain audiences, advertising in bathrooms is the piece de resistance of a campaign.

Nintendo achieved one of its most successful game launches in 2001 when it introduced "Conker's Bad Fur Day." Conker the squirrel drinks and urinates frequently. The media campaign included urinal mats, printed with the Conker URL, placed in men's bathrooms in major urban markets.

Urinal mats aren't for every advertiser bacause of marketers' concerns that people are peeing on their ad creative.

Some will venture into unusual media, such as electrically charged vinyl posters in bathrooms. (The electric charge causes the material to stick firmly to a glass surface.) Earlier this year, cable networks TBS posted 1,350 charged posters on bathroom mirrors around Los Angeles and New York City. Designed to lure viewers to reruns of Sex and the City, the message read: "Samantha. Richard Wright. Men's bathroom. Episode 87."

The packaging of condoms distributed in bathrooms has also become an advertising medium. Herc, a maker of a powder used in energy drinks run a condom-package-based marketing campaign featuring taglines like "Play Harder" and "Keep it up."

While decrying the loss of privacy, Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, looked on the bright side: "Maybe the benefit is that as bathrooms increasingly become a major place for advertising, we will all see cleaner public restrooms because advertisers will have a vested interest in keeping them that way."

From Adage, via Adverblog.

Related: Interactive gaming system for urinals.
The no-flush urinal.

China's visible growing pains.

Using time-lapse photography, Project Rebirth is currently documenting the day-by-day rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in New York City.

Six 35mm time-lapse motion picture cameras, situated around the site since the six-month anniversary of 9/11, will continue to shoot one frame of film every five minutes, seven days a week, until this historic reconstruction is completed. This technology will enable the public to view the entire reconstruction within a twenty-minute time span....

When there's a 40-foot tall robot in Times Square, even the most jaded New Yorkers gawk up at it like tourists. It was next to the Good Morning America studios; I think it's a promotion for the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Wired News introduces a new column by Regina Lynn Preciado. It's about sex. And technology. You'll dig it.

The man described as the father of the internet, Vint Cerf, talks about taking it into the stars.

pomona.edu by michael balchunas On a bright autumn morning, a golden eagle rides a thermal in the cup of sky above Roden Crater. The dark raptor floats on the air, primary feathers pointing like long black fingers from each sweeping wing. Then the bird glides away over the craters red cinder rim. In its brief flight, the eagle has painted itself onto the canvas of James Turrell 65, who is turning an extinct Arizona volcano and the sky above it into perhaps the worlds most ambitious work of contemporary art....

Xeni Jardin:
Over a thousand pounds of pig flesh processed at a Sioux Center meatpacking facility was recalled over fears that a missing microchip could be embedded in the meat.

The Sioux-Preme Packing Co. recalled 110 pork shoulder butts -- about 1,100 pounds of meat -- that could contain the metal devices used to measure scientific data in hogs.

Pass the tofurkey, please. Link

Summary: livescanned - A new word from the educational bureaucracy?

A COUPLE are set to tie the knot in Scotland’s first legal witch wedding. ..

The couple will both jump over a broomstick and have their hands bound together with a red cord during the 30-minute ceremony at the Temple of the Source Coven of the Blue Dragon in Niddry Street on September 21.

George Cameron, known as The Hermit, a Wicca witch and grand master of the Source Coven who will conduct the ceremony, said: "This is the most important event since the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951.

A wristwatch phone that lets you listen by sticking a finger in your ear, an MP3 player that vibrates the bones in your skull to play music that only you can hear -- these are some of the products being developed using a technology called bone conduction that sends sound waves through the bones around the ear.

The algorithms would allow robots to change shape and break apart in order to complete a mission in rough terrain

Masahiro postulated that initially, as the object of our attention is recognizably not only not human but not really even close to human in appearance, we tend to disregard 'nonhuman' appearance traits, and to anthropomorphize by attributing humanoid motives or reasoning to the object's actions. Pets, for example, look nothing like a person, so any recognizably non-human behaviors they exhibit - or, in the case of Hiro's two variables, non-human movement and non-human appearance - is ignored or interpreted as 'cute' or 'interesting' or other non-person to person cues.

However, at a certain point, as the object grows more human, we tend to stop cataloging the similarities and begin concentrating on the dissimilarities. As a result, highly-humaniform (but not perfect) renderings of people suffer because their motion, for example, looks wrong to people. Similarly, eyes lack some 'glitter', or facial muscles aren't present - these things become central to our perceptions of the object, and as a result, we think of them as 'passing for' human. The corpse, for example, looks almost human - but the color is wrong, there is no animation of the skin or muscles - and people can instantly recognize that there is 'something wrong with this picture.'

Hiro's findings were, of course, intended to aid in producing robots that could be easily accepted by people. His counterintuitive finding was that designers should avoid making their creations too lifelike, for they risked falling into the Uncanny Valley. [...] This may be one reason the 'pseudohuman' characters of Japanese videogames and anime games are more highly regarded than the fetishistically rendered ones of first person shooters.

Nanotechnology is offering a new way of processing fabric that could revolutionize the clothing industry. Nano-Tex, a leading company in the field, has developed processes that make traditional cotton and silk fabrics resistant to spills (NPR)

The BBC takes a quick survey of 10 alternative housing models for those disillusioned by a harsh world homeownership market.

The latest from Jared Tarbell. Wow....

Statement: Viral Communications focuses on constructing agile, scalable, collaborative systems that permit uncontrolled growth, minimal power use, and maximum ability to intercommunicate, with viral architectures moving the intelligence from the trunk to the leaves. Centered in the MIT Media Laboratory, this work addresses both the basic mechanisms of radio and the applications that embed communications in the bits and pieces of daily life, from clothes, to dog collars, to furniture. Link.

A cockroach-like robot named RHex (more pictures, video and information) is the starting point for a major project to understand how animals move without falling over, as robots can serve as a controlled experiment that's easier to manipulate than real animals but able to tackle real-world challenges.

Biologists, engineers and mathematicians from universities across the USA will try to understand the mechanical and neurological basis of locomotion.

RHex, a six-legged robot that scampers like a cockroach, will be tweaked and used it as a physical model to tease apart the complex neural and muscular networks in insects.

At the same time, they will conduct biomechanical and neurological experiments on insects and develop mathematical models to improve the robot.

Robert Full, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley and leader of the team, has studied animal locomotion for 30 years, and has contributed to other robots too:
- Ariel, which walks like a crab and was designed to detect underwater mines;

- Mecho-Gecko, a three legs robot with a pressure-sensitive adhesive (think Post-Its) to mimic the unroll-and-peel-off manner in which geckos climb up walls;

- and the Sprawlita, which bounces five body lengths at a time thanks to six piston-driven legs.

From Medical News Today, via Robotics.

See also Robopike (inspired by pikes), A robot that walks on water (imitates water skimmers), Ecobotil (the one that eats flies), The roachbot (real cockroach controlling a robot), Smaller, smarter and higher (fly-like robot), Locusts' navigational skills (a locust-inspired, collision-avoiding robot) and Lemur (climbing robot.)

In theory getting a meal plan based on your genetic profile is a brilliant idea. Practice so far seems a bit broad-scoped: almost like getting a meal plan based on personality type.

We have a feeling Microsoft is going to be none too happy about this, but Matsushita Electric Works has already commercialized technology that uses human skin as a data transmission medium to a number of manufacturers. Apparently some company called Teraoka Seikou will use the system to help butchers measure and sell meats. Which is an unexpected fit for the technology given the millions of other possible uses, but we won’t deny how eerily appropriate it is for a meat-seller to be using skin-transmitted data devices. We can’t wait!

Having less-than-perfect vision may be the secret of being a great artist, scientists reveal. A team from Harvard Medical School say the Dutch master Rembrandt may have had a "lazy eye". The scientists analysed his self-portraits and found one eye looked straight ahead, while the other looked outward. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, they say this may have helped him perceive the world as a flat image.

Has the era of hands-free Web surfing arrived?
Dmitry Gorodnichy, an inventor from the Institute of Information Technology in Ottawa, has developed a computer navigation system that relies on the movements of a user's nose to direct a cursor, New Scientist reported on Wednesday.

For good measure, a simple blink of the right or left eye corresponds to the right or left click of a mouse button, the magazine said.

The inventor expects the nose-steered mouse, or "nouse," will make using a computer easier for people with disabilities or for video game enthusiasts who would like to slay bad guys with the bob of the head and blink of an eye.

Large nostrils count more than a big nose when it come to smelling power, said German scientists on Wednesday after completing a three-year-long study aimed at treating smelling disorders.

Researcher Julia Vent from the University of Cologne examined 95 noses of men between 25 and 58 over three years to learn more about the link between nostril size and odor sensitivity and surgical methods to alleviate disorders.

"We found the bigger the nostril, the better the smelling power," said University of Cologne spokesman Christoph Uhlhaas. "It is not just outer size that counts." The results also found the right nostril is often more sensitive than the left.

Doctors have used thin sheets of cheek tissue to restore vision in people with damaged corneas.

A team from Osaka University transplanted thin layers of cheek cells onto the eyes of four patients with a rare and painful eye condition. The patients, whose vision had been cloudy, could see well afterwards, and their 'new corneas' were still clear more than a year later.

The Osaka team hope their work may also lead to other types of grow-your-own tissue transplants...

Yoko Ono is to exhibit photographs commissioned as part of a contemporary art festival in Liverpool.

The experimental artist's work, My Mummy Was Beautiful, will be on show at John Lennon Airport from Thursday.

The photographs, which are an homage to motherhood, show images of a woman's breasts and crotch.

FROM BEV: i'm speechless....but not surprised.

"An indeterminate number of cameras point towards the sky. The collective presence of all these images are joined together into an additive composite."

David Pescovitz:
First used centuries ago to treat battlefield wounds, maggots are proving to be a useful treatment to prevent post-operative infections. Maggot debridement therapy (MDT) calls for maggot dressing to be applied to wounds twice a week for up to 72 hours each time. From the press release about a recent study on MDT in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases:

"Debridement, or the removal of contaminated tissue to expose healthy tissue, can be done surgically. However, maggots that have been disinfected during the egg stage so that they don’t carry bacteria into the wound have their advantages. The larvae preferentially consume dead tissue (steering clear of live), they excrete an antibacterial agent, and they stimulate wound healing--all factors that could be linked to the lower occurrence of infection in maggot-treated wounds."

The original Ghost in the Shell, adapted from a manga (Japanese novel in comic-book form) by Shirow Masamune, inspired Andy and Larry Wachowski to make The Matrix [what didn't? --TM] and topped stateside video sales in 1996. Innocence, which premiered at Cannes last spring, catches up with Batou, a cyborg detective who journeys through a futuristic cityscape to crack the case of the killer gynoids (a term coined by Oshii). The prostitute ring of robotic Geisha-like sex-toys turns out to be masterminded by Kim, a crafty doll who fends off the investigation by implanting false experiences into Batou's "e-brain."

The sleuth eventually reunites with the Major, who exited her "shell" to become pure soul -- a ghost -- at the end of the first installment. Together they rescue hapless gynoids who become animated by having the ghosts of real girls "dubbed" into their bisque-coated physiques. In between his battles with Yakuza thugs, toxic firewalls and homicidally programmed assassins, Batou, Oshii's self-proclaimed alter ego, discusses Descartes, quotes Shelley and cites biblical passages.

Electric shock study provides insight into making anti-anxiety drugs

Electric shock experiments on humans have shown that brain regions linked to fear responses are also highly activated when fears are unlearned, a finding that provides insight into developing drugs for anxiety and other fear disorders.

Researcher Elizabeth Phelps and colleagues at New York University have found that a brain structure called the amygdala becomes most active as fears are unlearned. In addition, a connected area called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex appears to be critical for the extinction of fear.

David Pescovitz:
It's time again for the annual ArtBots Robot Talent Show in New York City, September 17, 18, and 19. Orchestrated by Dorkbot founder Douglas Repetto, Mark Tribe of Rhizome.org, and Hunter College film/media professor Mary Flanagan , the free ArtBots show will feature 20 artists and groups from seven countries (including Leonel Moura's ink pen-wielding ArtSBot, left).

"The show celebrates the strange and wonderful collision of shifty artists, disgraced engineers, high/low/no tech hackers, rogue scientists, beauty school dropouts, backyard pyros, and industrial espionage that has come to define the emerging field of robotic art. Participants include robots that sketch, carve, float, wiggle, hum, ring, grow, wander, and sing, as well a number of works the form and function of which are not yet well understood"

Link

Globalization has been one of the defining catch-phrases since the 1980's, and it's influence has been acting for much longer than that. A new piece of online art created by Istanbul-based photographer Mike Mike explores this force of homogeneous. By morphing crowds of faces into one "child" Face of Tomorrow gives the world a look at it's future face--one city at a time. The results are startling: beautiful, smooth, and not nearly as homogeneous as we might have feared. We talked to Mike about what he had learned through his work, and how he felt the inevitable sharing of ideas around the world would effect art and design as the face of tomorrow became the face of today.

(more...)

Move over Hummer, the monster truck is coming.

General Motors Corp.'s uber-sport utility, the Hummer, has been the biggest and baddest passenger truck on the US market to date, but it may soon be getting some outsized competition in the form of the CXT.

Modeled after commercial haulage trucks and dump trucks, the CXT will be the world's biggest production pick-up truck when it goes on sale later this year, its makers said Monday.

Plushie-mod softcore, basically:

This was indeed your "the human race is over. And humans lost" moment for today. You're welcome.

New media art both connects to and expands the dematerialization of the art object that occurred in earlier art movements. The new media object is a process in flux that is potentially interactive, dynamic, participatory and customizable and often oscillates between its inherent ephemeral nature and its material components or peoples desire to objectify it.

The Passage of Mirage features nine projects that address these issues by portraying the virtual object as a process, a data structure (or carrier thereof), or as an encoded reality. The artworks expand notions of the traditional art object, sometimes quite specifically with regard to more established art forms such as photography, film, or painting.

The works of Jim Campbell and Thomson & Craighead, for example, offer different approaches to processing the medium of film. Campbell's Illuminated Average #1 creates an average of all the frames of Hitchock's Psycho and collapses the film into one single image; by contrast, the artist's Night Light visualizes Psycho's sound level and the brightness of the image throughout the film. Thomson & Craighead's Short Films about Flying is an edition of unique cinematic works that were generated in real-time from existing data found on the World Wide Web: each "movie" (replete with opening titles and end credits) combines a video feed from Logan Airport in Boston with randomly loaded net radio sourced from elsewhere in the world.

John Gerrard's Watchful Portrait and Carlo Zanni's Altarboy both transform a portrait into a "living" process that is networked or responds to haptic sensation; and Wolfgang Staehle's and Vuk Cosic's works present a "live" version of a photograph or painting. In very different ways, the idea of the object as data carrier unfolds both in W. Bradford Paley's Code Profiles and Eric Paulos' Limelight, a sculptural object that doubles as automated threat detection and indication system.

While still informed by the aesthetics of more traditional media, the artworks in the exhibition are media objects that are process-oriented, reactive, or open to (real-time) data processing and intervention.

A grocer had his ear bitten off by a hungry customer when he refused to let him have a free watermelon. The Ukrainian man, not named for legal reasons, had demanded a watermelon at the shop in the Siberian town of Hanty Mansisk. But when the shop assistant refused to hand over a fruit for free, he flew into a rage, jumped over the counter and bit off his ear. Police who caught the blood stained attacker minutes later have charged him with grievious bodily harm and theft, saying: "We couldn't find the ear, we think he ate it. "He is undergoing medical tests to confirm if he swallowed the piece of ear or not." A Russian man was recently sentenced to four years in prison for biting off an ear of a bus driver in the Amur region during a row over a fare.

Experts at a UK anti-virus firm have discovered a job application buried in lines of code for two new computer worm viruses.

The message, which could only be read by anti-virus professionals said: "We searching 4 work in AV (anti-virus) industry."

While the calling card in the worms MyDoom-U and MyDoom-V may have won the programmer points for creativity, the anti-virus community was not impressed, says Sky News Online.

Graham Cluley, consultant for the firm, Sophos, said: "It's hard to tell if the creators of these new versions of the MyDoom worm are being serious. But there's no way that anybody in the anti-virus industry would touch them with a barge pole."

David Pescovitz:
Capsula Mundi is a design for a biodegradable coffin made from starch plastic that holds the deceased in a fetal position. The stunning artwork was created by Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel:

"Capsula Mundi is planted in the earth like a seed. Above it, to signal the presence of occupied space, is a shallow concave circle dug out of the ground. In the center of which, a tree is planted, the essence of it chosen in life by the dead one, the care of this tree is the responsibility of everyone. The aim is ecological burial, literally a more natural way to decay.


The cemetery will, then, acquire a new look. No longer the overpopulated urban environment with congested architecture, it will be a natural one in contact with the earth, enveloping expansive areas, entire hills consecrated to the cult of the dead. Summarizing, it is a different landscape devoted to the worship of our ancestry: a sacred forest."

Gaia is an ambitious project from the European Space Agency to create the most precise map of a billion stars in our Galaxy and millions of other celestial objects invisible from current telescopes. When the spacecraft is launched in 2010, it will carry the most sensitive cameras ever made. Its billion-pixel camera will be in fact composed of 170 separate cameras, tiled together in a mosaic to register every object that passes through the field of view. Each individual camera or 'charge-coupled device' (CCD) will have a resolution of almost nine million pixels. Gaia will take images for five years. The above link will provide you with more details about this billion-pixel camera, but here I chose to focus on a particular aspect of the mission: checking the usually unobversable asteroids between the Sun and the Earth because of light conditions. Read more...

In 1918, the Prostate Gland Warmer promised to "stimulate the abdominal brain!" The device consists of a 4.25 inch probe and a blue light bulb in a socket on a nine foot cord. When plugged in, the light bulb lit up

While the Recto Rotor was advertised as "The Latest and Most Efficient Invention for the Quick Relief of Piles, Constipation, and Prostate Trouble."

The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices Online

MSNBC.COM September 08, 2004 BY LEONARD DAVID They have become legendary in UFO circles. Huge, silent-running “Flying Triangles” have been seen by ground observers creeping through the sky low and slow near cities, and quietly cruising over highways. The National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, has cataloged the Triangle sightings, sifting through and combining databases to take a hard look at the mystery craft. Based in Las Vegas, NIDS is a privately funded science institute with a strong research focusing on aerial phenomena. The results of their study have just been released, and lead to some unnerving, puzzling conclusions....

It's been seven months since the Pentagon pulled the plug on LifeLog, its controversial project to archive almost everything about a person. But now, the Defense Department seems ready to revive large portions of the program, under a new name.

Using a series of sensors embedded in a G.I.'s gear, the Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology (ASSIST) project aims to collect what a soldier sees, says, and does in combat zone – and then to weave those events into digital memories, so commanders can have a better sense of how the fight unfolded.

That's similar to what planners at Pentagon research arm Darpa had in mind for LifeLog, its ultra-ambitious electronic diary effort. But ASSIST's aspirations are more modest, its battlefield focus is clearer, and its privacy concerns are more manageable, military analysts and computer scientists say. All of that combines to give the project a better chance of taking off where LifeLog crashed.

"Welcome to the wacky ways of contracting at the Defense Department. If it doesn't fly the first time around, you can be sure it'll be back. And so it is," said Steven Aftergood, with the Federation of American Scientists. "This time around, though, the work has a slightly more plausible context. And more of an effort has been made to connect it to a military application."

My Wired News article has details.

A futuristic eye scanner system at a Wearside school is scrapped because it is too slow.

The scanner was able to identify pupils anonymously by taking a picture of their eyes.

But the scheme has now been replaced by swipe cards because it was too slow.

Headteacher at the school, Dr Ed Yeates, said he hoped to bring back the system in six to eight months after "teething problems" had been ironed out.

He said: "The system was world-beating, but too slow and was only working at 50% of its capacity.

The grand prix winner of Designtope Restroom of the 21st Century is Kohei Odaka with Black Cube. The restroom is a narrow space made of charcoal. The only source of light is a luminescent toilet seat. Quite an experience to use I think. Kohei explains why he used charcoal for the walls. "The special qualities of the charcoal, which dehumidifies, deodorizes and emits minus-ions, soothe the body, and the reduction of visual information to the bare minimum sharpens the senses and creates a pleasurable sense of tension." How about a four square meter version for my apartment?

Scientists are studying deeply the practical and evolutionary aspects of women’s orgasms. And the their complexity. Makes merely having a penis seem a trivial affair.

The Johns Hopkins Newsletter: The science behind the female orgasm

The Penis Atlas is a book by four Norvegian sexologists, a photographer and a designer, using photographs of 100 men in order to inform, demystify and correct many existing misunderstandings about the male sex organ.

The publishers said the authors try to give a complete and correct presentation of the penis, in different ways and from differing viewpoints.

The book also includes a unique photo project, where 100 men are photographed in relaxed and erect state, and data on the size, variation according to weight and height, shape, color and more is catalogued and discussed.

Link.

It may not win in any features competitions, but the new Rolleiflex MiniDigi is a cutie, rethinking the famous Rollei Twin Lens Reflex camera as a tiny 2-megapixel version that retains the square format, top-down viewfinder, and dual-lens of the original. Of course, the film is tossed out for an SD slot, and while the MiniDigi is all digital, it retains the film advance crank on the side just to give it that 1920s feeling. Price will be about ¥40,000 (~$375) and will be released in the States by July.

via Gizmodo

I've been thinking about the adoption of new ideas lately, both in companies and in the market at large. Inspired by the Cambrian Explosion and subsequent die-off, I've been thinking about what happens to people's perceptions when new ideas come along.

[.....]

Thought 3: Comprehension thresholds create Moore's chasm
Geoffrey Moore defined a chasm in new technology adoption in his book "Crossing the Chasm." In it, he divides the adoption market for a given technology into 5 divisions:

A: Technology enthusiasts
B: Visionaries
C: Pragmatists
D: Conservatives
E: Skeptics

Note: I've cut off the two most trailing ends of the bell curve—theoretically it goes all the way to 0 on both ends.

While I was writing this piece, I was thinking about how to find the threshold at which an idea is too confusing for what should be its target audience. I don't have a good answer to that, but I started thinking about the art market as an idea market.

This made me think that there may be a similar chasm in art, which would imply that there's a similar chasm in all idea adoption. Look at the Moore curve again:

If the slices are relabled as follows, it still makes some sense:
A: avant-garde
B: experimental
C: mainstream
D: cliché
E: kitsch

Now, of course, the size of the slices doesn't represent the market size--there's a lot of kitsch out there--but maybe it represents the visibility of the style or the recognition of the style as "interesting." Anyway, it seems to make sense, though I haven't quite figured out how.

A band of renegade biologists is taking on a mammoth task that threatens to upset a status quo that has been unchallenged for almost 250 years. Put simply, they want to change the way scientists name every living organism on the planet.

These rebels say that our system of naming plants, animals, fungi and bacteria, famously introduced by Linnaeus in 1758, is frustrating efforts to understand the living world. They want to replace it with a more rational scheme they call the PhyloCode.

Critics have slammed their proposal, arguing that it will be a waste of time and effort that will hinder the urgent task of cataloguing the thousands or even millions of as yet undiscovered species before they go extinct. It could also compromise laws designed to protect biodiversity, placing endangered species at unnecessary risk.

Linnaeus developed the now familiar binomial system of nomenclature, in which the name of each species includes its genus. This identifies Homo sapiens, for example, as a member of the genus Homo.

That system has since been expanded, so that every identified living species is also placed in a hierarchy that stretches from phylum at the top, down through class, order, family and genus.

"Free Streaming Surgical Videos. Featuring the World's First SurgeonCam and the The Digital Endoscopy Fellowship. A Digital Window to the OR for Physicians, Trainees, and Patients. Featuring Cutting Edge Open and Endoscopic Surgery From the World's Leading Medical Centers. New videos are added daily - check back soon for clip-links that are not yet active. Surgery is an inherently visual art. It must be seen to be understood. "

NOTE FROM BEV: not for the squeamish

Nicholas Stedman’s Blanket is a robotic sculpture in the form of a blanket that crawls around a space, finds people there and crawl over to and on top of them, "like a pet."

The blanket is equipped with a wireless transceiver, a PIC microprocessor, and a camera to detect bodies in that space and beam the data to the blanket which will then scuttle across to detected objects. Each part of the blanket's skeleton is fitted with a pressure sensor enabling it to respond to physical movement from the people it envelops.

The artist collaborated with Rhya Tamasauskas to present Tribot (video) at Artbots , a Robot Talent Show that will take place on September 17, 18, & 19 in New York.

This "alien companion" attempts to blindly navigate through a given space. For ArtBots, the artists will take Tribot on a walk through parts of New York City and document the event. The artists' aim is to try to generate social interaction with the machine.

From Grand Text Auto, via Interactive Media Division Weblog.

Related entry: The Robot Talent Show.

Posted by Regine at 08:49 AM

Space.com - A group of European-led astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system.





"Although it is surely much bigger than a terrestrial-size object [like Earth], it is a strange feeling that it may indeed be the first planetary system beyond our own ever imaged," said Christophe Dumas, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory.

Healthy but dreamless woman helps researchers learn more about dreaming's generation and importance

Researchers are closer to understanding the generation and importance of dreams thanks to the help of a woman who apparently lost the ability to dream following a stroke.

Bug eating robots are so yesterday. Today it's all about robots that can walk on water. [Slashdot]

Eventually caught for one of his crimes — the murder of Catlady, a middle aged woman who lives with multiple cats and phallic sculptures, but isn’t called Phalliclady for some reason — Alex is offered his liberty in exchange for undergoing the experimental Ludovico Technique. This consists of wearing the spectacular head dress and attending the carnival of unmitigated pain: the head clamp allows endless agony-enhancing chemicals to be pumped directly into your brain while you’re simultaneously force fed images of extreme grimness of all kinds, shapes and sizes.

The treatment is a huge success and afterwards Alex is unable to consider anything involving violence or badly synthesised classical music without vomiting and pain.

Little Known Fact: along with the boot licking scene, the Ludovico Technique scenes are the most popular Movieoke request at Aversion Therapist get-togethers.

Click here for last week’s Movie Gadget Friday: The Pong console from Brian de Palma’s The Fury

The trance-like state significantly alters neural activity in the higher-functioning areas of the brain, an imaging study finds

The Everywhere Displays project, from IBM Research Labs, aims to develop systems that allow the transformation of every surface in a space into a projected "touch screen".

Plastic snap assembled seaweed.

I’m fascinated by designs inspired by nature. This forgotten treasure of tidepools is actually made of plastic and can snap together with other algae to create a curtain, screen or wall decoration. They’re 12 inches by 8 inches each, and are available in red, green, black or white. $25 for a set of six, or $200 for 50 at the manufacturer’s showroom store in NYC. Vitra, 212-929-3626.

DESIGNER: Ronan Bouroullec, Erwan Bouroullec

LINK: bouroullec.com

welcome to the new btang blog, appropriately renamed to "bTang reBlog" since it's not photo-centric anymore and i'm using Eyebeam's reBlog software. after guest reblogging for the reBlog site last month, i was hooked.

something to note are the new additions on the right: a "found photo" blog and a personal news area where i can post if i won't be blogging for some time or any other news pertaining to me myself and I, and my projects. and the cherry on the top is that the background changes every time you load the page! woot!

Reuters reports that Leonard van Munster in Amsterdam invented a talking toilet which can "expound on the perils of smoking or the futility of war and berate them on hygiene and cleanliness." Hopefully they also installed some of this in Madison Square Garden.

Scientists at the Department of Industrial Microbiology at University College Dublin have discovered a bacterial strain that can detoxify styrene, a toxic byproduct of the polystyrene industry (which produces Styrofoam, among other things), and turn it into a green, biodegradable plastic.

Styrene is found in many types of industrial effluent. It causes lung irritation and muscle weakness, and affects the brain and nervous system in people and animals.

The Irish scientists used a species of bacterium, Pseudomonas putida (picture below), that occurs naturally in soil and can live on styrene. They grew it in a bioreactor with styrene as the sole source of carbon and energy. Their efforts resulted in the isolation of the styrene-eating Pseudomonas putida strain CA-3, which converts styrene into the plastic polymer PHA as a stored energy source.

The process completely removes the pollutant and the plastic made by the bacteria has a wide range of potential industrial and commercial uses such as medical implants, scaffolds for tissue engineering, wound management, drug carriers, plastic coating of cardboard and heat-resistant plastic.

"I think we'll see a lot more of this type of technology in the future," said O'Connor, one of the Dublin researchers. "Sustainable development and clean production through white biotechnology is the way forward. Not only bacteria to clean up the mess we make -- as in oil-eating bacteria -- but to prevent the mess in the first place.

From Wired News.

SCOTTeVEST (SeV) and Global Solar Energy announced that the solar-powered jacket designed to carry, connect and charge portable devices will be available in time for the holidays.

The solar panels are attached to the jacket, which boasts removable sleeves, over 30 hidden pockets and the "Personal Area Network (PAN)", which conceals wires associated with power sources and earbuds.

The solar panels are flexible thin-film photovoltaic material made from copper indium gallium diselenide sun-absorbing material placed onto a thin stainless steel substrate. The panels convert sunlight into electricity that charges a hidden battery pack, which in turn can charge any device compatible with USB chargers, including mobile phones, PDAs, Game Boys, MP3 players and other mobile devices.

The solar panels are removable and can be used separately from the jackets.

You can preorder one for $425.

From The Raw Feed (< eMediawire) and Engadget.

Pod Massager by farah sit @ risd	Feels Good - from New Nomads by Philips Design

Farah Sit, at the school of design has won an award of distinction from I.D. Magazine for ‘Pod Massager’ a scarf-like massager made of electric screw parts. {via}

From “>I.D. Magazine:

“In a year of war and uncertainty, this project tapped into a widespread desire for creature comforts,” observed Kalman of Farrah Sit’s portable massaging device. The brief, for a course called Appropriate Technology and Sustainability, was to design a product using all or some of the mechanical and electrical components of a handheld, battery-operated screwdriver. With help from Brown University engineering student Abby Thomas, Sit machined and press-fit an off-centered weight onto a small motor, encased and wired it to batteries, then sheathed it in rubber to distribute the vibration. Noting that most handheld massagers on the market are impersonal products made from bulky injection-molded plastics, she housed her massaging motor in a form more appropriate to its function: a soft, comforting scarf. The pea-green textile, which Kalman seized and draped over her own shoulders, can be wrapped around the body or slung over the back of a chair.

The project reminds me of the one of the garments created by Philips Design. The website that was once available at the Philips Design site is now defunct, but the book is available from 010 publishers. ‘Feels Good’ is a cream kimono with a conductive embroidered spine at the back. The fibres are able to disperse an electrostatic charge which creates a tingling sensation, supposedly relaxing the wearer. The level of charge can be set via a remote control device hidden inside a pocket, or biometric sensors.

There's a certain poetry to the words and images on Zentai Woman's latex and fabric bondage fetish site: "The wonder space which cannot be moved satisfactorily ... How can the sound of the outside which can be heard through cloth really be heard?" (And if we seem to be waxing rhapsodic about porn more than usual at Fleshbot this week, sorry. It's the heat.)

Zentai Woman (galleries @ infoseek.co.jp)

Previously: The Art of the Mask, Nicole Tran Va Bang, Fetishwear by Demask, Skintight, Rubberella, Live Anime Porn

(Thanks Ray Lopez and Peter Rothman!)

Don Norman speculated about a "Personal Life Recorder" (PLR) type of device back in his 1992 book "Turn Signals Are The Facial Expression of Automobiles". He theorized that these PLR's would start out as a device given to young children, called the "Teddy". The "Teddy" would be given to us as children and record all of our personal life moments, and as we mature, the data could be transferred to new devices that matched out maturity level.

USA Today reported that a newly developed type of computer memory, called MRAM could make the vision of a PLR-type device possible, as well as "instant-on computers" and "longer battery life for pervasive devices".

Below is the description of New Media Arts from the Australia Council Support for the Arts Handbook 2004.

"New media art describes a process where new technology is used by artists to create works that explore new modes of artistic expression. New media art projects use new technologies such as computers, information and communications technology, virtual or immersive environments, or sound engineering to create works.

Projects which apply new technologies within a single art-form will not be funded by the New Media Arts Board."

Appart from the vague description of technology, it is interesting to note that they view new technologies as a tool, and not the subject of creative work. Is our relationship with technology is not a valid subject? As materially intense new media technology become just another creative tool artists and their works become increasingly disconnected from their global dwelling. Another example of how technology itself is becoming increasingly unquestionable while at the same time connecting us more directly to a global flows of materials and labor, which can be argued as being unsustainable.

http://www.ozco.gov.au/boards/new_media_arts/

"As long as there's some cocoa around, I can now go and stay at my boyfriend's place and know I don't need to worry if my tummy starts hurting," a young woman liberated by the beverage tells Shukan Gendai. "I can have a crap in peace..."

Australian artist Natalie Jerimijenko is attempting to make the movie “Babe” (about a talking pig) into reality. Her new project “OOZ” (Zoo spelled backwards) is a series of human/animal interfaces that provides communication channels between species as well as increasing our understanding of how we relate to our natural environment and the other “creatures” that inhabit it. Some examples include “GooseSpeak” (pictured above) which features a tele-operated goose that swims with the natural geese and allows you to communicate to them remotely. The “WaterStrider” is a remote controlled water bug with an embedded pager motor that allows people to send “mating calls” to other bugs over the water’s surface. A good start to some integration of robots into nature, but I’m curious if the effect will be much different than simple remote controlled boats, people in boats, people feeding the animals normally - or if the bugs, geese, and horses will actually respond to these interventions? I guess we’ll have to wait until results are posted or maybe we can just spend more quality time with our dogs and cats and ask them?

While bioinformatics isn't likely to create any new software stars, neuroinformatics will. The reason is simple: complexity. As I mentioned recently, the data about a person's genome can already fit on an ipod, yet the data about one's brain will require petabytes, if not exabytes, of storage capacity.

How much is a petabyte? One example is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine that contains approximately 1 petabyte of data and it has been archiving almost every webpage created since 1993.

Along with government initiatives like the human brain project there are also several small companies targeting neuroinformatics like Australia's Brain Resource Company (BRC), San Diego's Neurome, and Chicago's MIICRO.

Here is an overview of what BRC is up to (courtesy of Psychscape)

BRC has has set up the world's first standardized international database on the human brain. BRC already has a database of over 1,000 normative subjects and over 500 clinical subjects and still growing. This collaboration of scientists and technology partners (such as IBM) gathers information into a neuroscience database which includes demographic, neuropsychological (cognitive), electrical brain-body function, sMRI, fMRI, genetic and lifestyle data along with function, structure and genetics of patients' brains. A patient who is referred to the database (by over 50 researchers from around the globe), first enters data online - this consists of demographic data such as age, gender, eating and drinking habits, early childhood experiences. The patient tben goes into one of the BRC labs to undergo various tests, such as MRIs and EEGs

One of the goals of the BRC is to allow rapid comparisons of a patient profile against the normative data with the goal of predicting a response to particular drugs or anticipate a side effect to a specific intervention. Science has been chasing the ability to predict a personal response to any clinical intervention. Who will respond and who will not respond is extremely valuable information to the pharmaceutical industry as well as to clinicians.

Cory Doctorow:

The Aquadom is the world's largest cylindrical aquarium. It's in the lobby of a multi-use development, stretching 5 storeys up, with a glass elevator down the middle of it.

Link

(Thanks, kokogiak!)

Self-assemble into nanoscale structures for tiny devices

As 60 leading scientists attest, the movie is more relevant and important today than ever

microsoft's Andrew Wilson recently announced a new touch screen called "touchlight" that uses 2 cameras placed in a way that there is no parallax. so when videoconferencing with it, you can look the other person in the other location right in the eye, among other things.....i'm sure ;-) see the interview and demonstration in video. [via]