digitaldust

‘Tentacled Monstrosity’

‘Vacuous Nothingness’
(more…)

Motorola and Frog design wearable/bluetooth concepts. They look one hell of a lot better than the geek-wear currently masquerading as wearables.

Whoa!! Silicon implants in rats brains. Replacing parts of the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a lot simpler than higher brain functions but low level interfaces like this could and will provide revolutionary for not just the Alzheimer’s/stroke treatments they are talking about but also physical-prosthetics interfaces.

These things creep up on you faster than you predict. I thought this sort of tech would still be a few years off. Still they don’t know if it will work or even how well. I’m surprised that this sort of things has been in the pipeline for ten years now. Here’s the New Scientist article about it.

I love science.

The art of Lee Bul, a Korean artist, turns me on. There is the promise of the future seductively enclosed in slinky near human forms.

I’ve set up a message board installation here. It’s the nascent form of what I hope to turn in to the trucker caps website. There’s no good trucker caps fan site around so I thought I would see what I could do. plus I’m meant to be playing with community tools for work so I can kill 2 birds with one site.

My intentions were to have a sort of image posting site where officianados of the mesh back cap can post pics and comment on them. I might need to learn some php and hack this to do that. Lets see what I can do.

Anyone who happens to come across it feel free to sign up and play. It may be wiped at any point and started again. I hope I will be able to export and stuff stored, but I’m not promising.

As it’s often said there’s lies, damned lies and statistics. Statistics can be used to say just about anything about anything. It’s not the numbers it’s how you use them. Still I feel that two sets of oppositely biased statistics can tell the truth, a perverse sort of two wrongs making a right.

In the case of the Iraq conflict the “good guys” are not even using statistics to support their case, they’re using pure rhetoric and a few key facts. Like Iraq not having complied with a few UN resolutions and giving numbers of warheads and amounts of nuclear materials Saddam might have. The best statistics come from the dove side, the peaceniks come up with more and better sounding numbers. Of course I take these all with a pinch of salt but the ones I’ve personally researched are right, and many others I’ve heard before.

Anyway, to cut to the point, here’s a list of statistics supporting the side of peace. Or at least supporting the side of reduced US aggression.

A few choice selections from the 50+ stats above.

… US military spending, about $450 billion…

7. Q: What percent of US military spending would ensure the essentials of life to everyone in the world, according to the UN?
A: 10% (that’s about$40 billion, the amount of funding initially requested to fund our retaliatory attack on Afghanistan).

28. Q: How many pounds of explosives were dropped on Iraq between December 1998
and September 1999?
A: 20 million

Wow…!! Uncontrol is a must play.

I’ve just rediscovered this site after finding a stray link on my desktop. Lots of crazy dynamics and physical system based flash toys. I love this stuff, could play for hours. It’s all by some guy called Manny Tan in NYC. Its also great that it’s all open source. I might have to dust off my flash installation and have a look under the hood.

Welcome to Interzone

Whilst going to UCL for the lecture below I stumbled on this cool looking university collection. The Grant Museum of Zoology And Comparative Anatomy.

It looks like it’s up there with the Hunterian for medical weirdness and strange stuff. Only open wednesday and friday afternoons. I’ll have to sneak up one day soon.

I went along to this entertaining lecture on coincidence. Amongst other fascinating tricks of probability and chance I picked up this useful titbit. The probability that at least two people in a group have the same birthday.