Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model's help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait.
The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.
(Via Grinding.)
Consisting of three spherical shells embedded with seeds, the habitat is designed to evolve with the seasons - starting the cycle in spring, the spheres are embedded in a mixture of earth/mud/seed, and as summer approaches, the plants will be in bloom and the embedded food in the mud will create a mini haven for local animals and birds. The earth should weather away by fall and winter, leaving the permanent shells ready to be packed again for spring.
Civilization by Marco Brambilla from CRUSH on Vimeo.
Wallabies are breaking into Tasmania's poppy fields and getting high.
The strange occurrence, revealed in a State Government Budget Estimates hearing, has also solved what some growers say has spurred a campfire legend about mysterious crop circles that appear in northern Tasmania's poppy paddocks.
In true X-Files-style, Attorney-General Lara Giddings said the drugged out wallabies had been found hopping around in circles squashing the poppies, creating the formations -- and hence solving the mystery.
The glittering shell-like paint frames the tongue shaped furniture protrusions that grow from the surrounding walls. Each element has been carefully chosen to coincide with the organic theme of the building, and as Senosiain describes, "This home's social life flows inside The Nautilus without any division, a harmonic area in three dimensions where you can notice the continuous dynamic of the fourth dimension when moving in spiral over the stairs with a feeling of floating over the vegetation."
Now this sounds fun: NASA has plans to fire a rocket into the moon to create a six-mile high explosion. Why? To see if there's any water there that we might be able to use if we ever colonize our largest satellite.
Seriously, how awesome will this be?
The physics behind the warpship is purely theoretical: "Dark energy" needs to be understood and harnessed, plus vast amounts of energy need to be generated, meaning the warpship is a technology that could only be conceived in the far future.
That said, Obousy's warpship design uses our current knowledge of spacetime and superstring theory to arrive at this futuristic concept.
Malfunctioning fire alarms going off inside foreclosed homes have become a major distraction for fire departments in suburban Arizona, according to ABC15 News.
Fire fighters, however, cannot legally enter a property unless they see smoke or have obtained the owner's permission. But in an era of bank ownership and rampant foreclosure, even finding the owners can take weeks.
The result is that "neighbors have to listen to the alarm until the battery dies, which can take days."
First we were surrounded by ruins, and then those ruins began to sing.
"For cities that are affected by polar jet streams such as Tokyo, Seoul, and New York, the high-altitude resource is phenomenal," Archer continued. "New York, which has the highest average high-altitude wind power density of any U.S. city, has an average wind power density of up to 16 kilowatts per square meter."
Several technologies have been proposed to harvest these high altitude winds, including tethered, kite-like turbines that would be floated to the altitude of the jet streams at an altitude of 20,000-50,000 feet and transmit up to 40 megawatts of electricity to the ground via the tether.
But don't expect the high altitude wind harvesting to begin right away. Th researchers say that a lot needs to fall into place before the technology is feasible for large-scale electricity generation.
(Via KurzweilAI.net.)
