Designed by Naoki Hirakoso and Takamitsu Kitahara, the Kai Table has multiple internal compartments, but with the twist that each of them takes the form of a hidden compartment as seen on other furniture.

I’ve always been a sucker for hidden compartments, and although the location of the compartments are quite obvious given the size of the piece, it still presses all the right buttons for me.

Jie Qi at the High-Low Tech lab at MIT’s Media Lab, posted a HOWTO on nitinol and origami. In the HOWTO she mentions that you can’t solder the nitinol directly, and so you’ll have to have create a soldering pad for it. (She used a craft crimp bead.) Another tip she gives is the need to preheat the nitinol by running a 9 volt charge through it for five seconds. When the wire relaxes, it will become be longer than it was originally, and so you’ll need to retention the wire. Last of all, she warns against keeping the wire energized too long, lest your “burn out” the nitinol. In another project, Qi mentions she used 0.006 inch flexinol for the origami, but used 0.01 inch for the more rapid vine/snake project.

I have had a fairly long interest in synthetic plants and was thinking if nitinol could be used to in a heliostat or some sort of dinural deployable structure, but I never knew the reaction time of nitinol. Seeing it used understanding what voltages are required was helpful. (Poking around just now, I also ended up finding a handy nitinol wire width-voltage-time-force table.) While I doubt that I will ever actually build whatever vague idea idea I have for synthetic plant, I’ve come to conclusion that nitinol perhaps isn’t the best choice of materials if you want it to hold position for any considerable length of time (or at least not without some sort of mechanical latching).

Previously.

Before the end of the 44th POTUS, he will accomplish something more evil than possibly be imagined. Even if it it is only the destruction of the one dollar bill. That will be evil enough to make his place in history as a brother of Satan, son of Satan, or Satan itself.

And now you know why the keep trying to put a woman on the dollar coins. Woman? Whore of Babylon? Do I have to spell it out for you?

For years, I said I wanted to receive a painting done by Cheetah, but now he’s dead. Instead, I will settle for a 5 minute phone call from The Nature Boy™ Rick Flair, for the low low price of $100 per minute.

Get your parents permission, and call now!

I have recently discovered clothing designer Carol Christian Poell. His coats are some of most unique and stylish things I’ve seen. They look like they’re peacoats from some sort of future Christian Bale dystopia. Although his “high collar jackets” are a bit comical, and make the wearer look like Darth Malak. Curious, I looked around online to find some place that sold his clothes. I found two. Darklands in Berlin, and Atelier New York. The prices are insane. €2853 for the “Meltlock one piece dead end coat”, and it’s not even in my size.

It is a coat I would wear though.

Seriously.

The always entertaining and informative show Radiolab, brings us the strange case that according to Marvel Comics, mutants aren’t human. Which is ironic because the entire undercurrent of the X-Men universe is the bigotry and right of mutants to be seen as equals.

Why did Marvel do this? Tariffs. “Dolls representing only human beings and parts and accessories thereof: Dolls whether or not dressed: Other: Not over 33 cm in height” are taxed at 12%, while “Toys representing animals or other non-human creatures (for example, robots and monsters) and parts and accessories thereof” are taxed at 6.8%. Toy Biz, the company manufacturing the toys for Marvel, argued in court that since some of the X-Men were blue, they weren’t human, and therefore the “action figures” were “toys” and not “dolls.” Yglesias is right, in pointing out that there is absolutely no logical reason why there would be this discrepancy, but there it is.

When I heard this, I immediately thought of customs agents thumbing through containers and putting Wolverine in the 6.8% “toy” pile, putting Nick Fury in the 12% “doll” pile, and woe to the agent that puts Juggernaut in the “toy” pile. Cain Marko’s powers are magical, so he’s not a mutant. (However, Ultimate Juggernaut is a muttie.) Alas, I suspect customs just throws everything marked “Marvel” in the 6.8 pile.

Zander Olsen‘s ongoing project “Tree, Line” wraps trees with white plastic up to the horizon and then photographs the resulting illusion. The results are a bit surprising, and I thought that some of them were manipulated until I looked more closely at them.

Architecture firm Tetuo Kondo, installed A Path in a Forest, elevated walkway through part of the Kadriorg forest located inside Tallinn, Estonia. 95 meters long, it is supported solely through straps fastened to the trees. It was created as part of LIFT 11, a “festival of urban installations.”

At first I thought this was a wooden walkway, but it looks like it’s entirely metal, which is kind of disappointing, but probably inevitable because of weight restrictions. It is also very reminiscent of their 2010 Venice installation, Cloudscapes, only outdoors.

Now this is interesting.

Supermechanical has created a Kickstarter project to manufacture very simple wireless sensors such as sensor, temperature, moisture and switches, people to monitor their surroundings by using a web interface to define rules for when each sensor should alert via SMS, Twitter, or email. Want to know when the dryer shuts off? Put a vibration sensor on it, and you’ll get an email when it’s done.

For decades now, we’ve been promised the smart home, where appliances would interact with each other, but those visions always seemed to involve homeowners replacing all their belonging with new smart appliances that have never arrived. Also, if my experiences with digital home entertainment is any guide, I strongly suspect that homeowners would be left with a selection of mutually incompatible, or barely compatible devices that make me just want to cry. (DLNA, I’m looking at you.)