Vinyl stickers for MacBooks isn’t new. Etsy lists 1075 results. Of course many of them aren’t that good, but I do like the ones that integrate the laser cut apple in a clever way, like Moses on the Mount from above.
A while back, I thought about laser etching my laptop. I thought about placing the apple in the center of the Aztec calendar. Ultimately, I decided against it because there just isn’t enough room to really show what the motif is.
Wow. No this is big. As Richard Ebright, molecular biologist at Rutgers, said, “This is literally a turning point in the relationship between man and nature. ”
Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute, created a synthetic DNA strand, implanted it into a gutted bacterium, and got it under go mitosis. The press is billing this as “synthetic life,” but it’s not. Not yet. You still need a natural cell. How long it will take to create the first fully synthetic organism I don’t know. I’m sure someone is working on it though.
According to NPR, the hard part of creating the synthetic DNA was making it long enough. Previous technology could only stitch together a few hundred base pairs, while a viable DNA sequence needs millions. The trick was to build small fragments and then place the fragments into yeast to do the final assembly.
So that they could prove that the synthetic DNA duplicated correctly, the team added a set of watermarks to the end of the DNA strand. The watermarks were the names of everyone on the 46 person team, along with the James Joyce quote, “to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.” Since each base pair encodes two bits (One bit for the nucleobases (adenine-thymine versus cytosine-guanine), and the second for the orientation (AT/CG versus TA/GC).), and assuming the text was encoded using the 26 letters of the English alphabet, you would need three base pairs per character. Since 2^(2*3) = 2^6 = 64, you would have 41 empty encodings. This means you could encode letters, digits, and punctuation. For comparison, after removing all the control codes and lowercase letters, ASCII contains 69 characters.
I find this fascinating on two levels. First, Venter uses the words like “software” and “programming” describe this work. DNA is software, but it’s not just operating instructions, it’s building instructions. Today, we already have scientists that grab single genes from other species and splice them into other organisms, like Roundup resistant soybeans. If we can build entire DNA sequences, this implies a future organisms could be uploaded to a Thingiverse-like site, where users could download organisms. Also, if the genes and the proteome can be understood (or at least understood on a block level), it seems possible that scientists could begin to construct single cell organisms by assembling a mixture of parts, like a Lego kit.
The other thing that’s interesting are these watermarks. I love the idea of encoding messages into DNA sequences. It’s microfilm for the 21st century. One could build an entire design fiction story around this idea. You could store a message inside a person, like Leeloo, or use it in a bacteria dead drop. Of course, over time your message would be corrupted. Which makes me wonder how mutations manifest? Does the strand break and the reform incorrectly, meaning splices and flips, or what? If so what types of error correction would be needed? Simple parity checks wouldn’t work for this.
We do live in the future.
Mario, was a recent Italian immigrant, just trying make a living cleaning drains and fixing leaking pipes. No one paid much attention to him at first, but as the number of recent arrivals from Italy increased, tensions in the community grew.
On that fateful Saturday, a rumor spread that Mario had been caught trying to force himself on one of the town’s beautiful blonde maidens, Peach. Gathering clubs, the townspeople gather outside the small cottage that Mario shared with is brother, and demanded Mario to be sent out. When they refused, they broke through the door, and beat Mario’s brother so hard that he remained in the hospital for a week and almost died.
Mario was dragged from his home, and hanged in a near by tree. As hung there, slowly strangling, men and children would beat him until he died, and then continued to beat him until his body broken and torn.
After the lynching, doubts about the rumor began. Some even say that the rumor was started by an rival plumber with a vendetta. The truth is now lost.
Tristan Shone is a one man doom metal band performing under the name “Author and Punisher.” His twist? He makes his own instruments. Things like throttles that control bass frequencies and sliders that control drums. He calls them “drone and dub machines.”
After the jump is an interview with Tristan, complete with performances, from Ground Control Magazine. Make talked about him last year as well.
Musically, it’s odd. There’s no getting around that. That’s not to say that it’s bad. I listen to some odd stuff. Personally, I find it kind of calming. It’s music to listen to in the dark late at night, and just wash over you. It’s not for everyone though.
If you’d like to see a performance, he’s performing at Makerfaire this year.
De Grisogono Meccanico DG:
Devon Treadmill:
Sometime in my childhood, maybe during junior high, I decided there were three things that were symbols of adulthood: coffee, leather wallets, and analog watches. These weren’t just symbols of adulthood, but symbols of The Establishment™. I swore them all off. In late high school or early collage, I surrender to coffee, but I have held on to my digital watches, and my cloth wallets.
It hasn’t always been easy. I recently carried a leather wallet for a few days last August, and I have been flirting with the idea of an all mechanical analog watch. (It must have a spring. It must need winding. Like the Akribos XXIV AK406SS, but only more durable.) Why mechanical? Because it’s classy, and testament to precision engineering. (Interestingly enough, Wikipedia describes how the number of jewels in the a mechanical watch is essentially meaningless ad copy.) Still, a mechanical watch is analog, and the rule 12 year old Jonathan made was “no watches with hands.”
These watches from De Grisogono and Devon get around that rule. They’re all mechanical, yet still digital. Ironically, the De Grisogono Meccanio DG is the most digital, yet also the most analog. It uses a series of cams to drive the seven segment displays. It’s ingenious. The Devon Tredmill on the other hand uses belts and geneva drives(?) to display the time directly.
Yes, both of these watches are extremely expensive and constitute a luxury good, they’re goods I’d love to have, just to admire how they work.
In the original Sim City there were these scenarios that you could play. You were given a city and problem to solve. San Francisco 1906? Earthquake. (Remember, in the even of a major disaster, you may need to be self sufficient for up to 72 hours. Are you prepared? I’m not.) Tokyo 1961? Monster. You get the picture. They were all fairly straight forward, except one. Detroit 1972. Problem? Well… Detroit.
It’s become a contemporary American past time to bash Detroit. I’m not looking to do that. All I will say that I’ve been to Detroit, and it’s the only place I’ve been where the nightlife was in suburbs instead of the city, and peeking over the sound barriers on the freeway never revealed a nice part of town. It’s clearly a city that has seen better days, and has earned its distinction of being a “donut city.”
Its historic buildings are either falling apart, or are being looted for new development elsewhere.
Detroit’s population has steadily shrank since the 1970s, but it still rated as the 11th most populous city, just between San Jose and San Francisco. Unsurprisingly, the city hasn’t depopulated in a controlled manner, so there population is spread thin across the 139 square mile city. This means that Detroit has to maintain an infrastructure for the population 2 million, when less than a million actually use. 40% of the city is fallow. (Of course, this isn’t Detroit’s only problem.)
For years now, one proposed solution to this problem has been to shrink the city. Unoccupied buildings would be condemned, occupied ones bought, and the population relocated closer to downtown. A more controlled Devil’s Night, if you will. Surprisingly, the talk turned serious last year, with the mayor proposing to shrink the city by a fourth.
Today, they started.
Will it work? In 1961, Jane Jacobs described the city as being “largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.” If that’s true, then there’s no core to build around.
Good luck Detroit.
Since I deactivated my Facebook account, (I’m debating about actually deleting it.) I’ve been wanting a way to share (and by “share,” I mean “post to a blog that no one reads anymore”) useless memes. So I created the meme category. It’s hidden from the main page, but it should still show up in the RSS feeds.
Now you are properly prepared for one half of the battle.
Update: Fri May 21 23:20:39 PDT 2010
I’ve had some content-free posts before. I’m killing the meme section. I’m going to reconsider using del.icio.us for links sharing though. Everything should appear on the main page now.
You’ve seen the show, now own the tattoo.
Evil Mad Scientist combined some LED throwies with sea urchin shells to create these interesting little lights. Throwies show up a lot on Make, probably because they’re brain dead simple, and like everything with LEDs, fun to look at. Wikipedia even lists some throwie derivatives.
I guess this means LEDs are the new candles. They’ve already taken over floaters, but at least the tea lights still have hot air balloons.
