Robot Monkeys

An unnamed lieutenant on the USS Voyager, is creating a Star Trek theme park in Jordan.

This is much cooler (or at least geekier) than Hamad’s totally not overcompensating exploits.

A 17 year old high school student survived the 220 foot jump with a broken tailbone and a torn lung.

He did it on a dare.

Third in the series of indeterminate length, Recolonizing Detroit

Calling Paul Romer’s charter cities, “OCP-like company towns” is unfair. The towns presumably would be run like any other city controlled by colonial power; or at least like any other city occupied by the colonial power (i.e the indigenous population kept out of the highest reaches of power). However there once was a plan for a real Delta City: Walt Disney’s EPCOT. A state of the art, centrally planned town, where every resident would be an employee of the Walt Disney Company (retirees would be evicted), and no one would own – nor control – their own residences. (See Walt Disney tout EPCOT at the 9:10 mark.) The town would be run by the board of directors of the Walt Disney corporation, presumably with Walt himself as feudal lord. Anti-democratic?, Well as the OCP President said in RoboCop 2, “Anybody can own a share [of OCP]. What could be more democratic?” (Funny how often rabid anti-communists aren’t exactly democracy’s biggest supporters, isn’t it?)

EPCOT never got off the ground, and instead turned into a rather dreary part of Walt Disney World with a giant golf ball for a center piece. Even when I saw it in 1989, it seemed like the fabulous future of 1992 circa 1982. (A robot that can draw pictures! A computer that plays music! Zounds!) The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow didn’t completely die though. In 1996, it spawned Celebration, Florida, a town centrally planned by the Walt Disney Corporation.

Celebration, is planned according to the New Urbanism school. You may recognize this style from the town in the Truman Show, Seaside, Florida. Personally, I find the towns repugnant. The faux-small town feel, the “rustic” municipal architecture. It’s so saccharine. It’s Stepford, Connecticut. They leave me with impression zoning laws and homeowner associations that preoccupied with maintaining soul crushing conformity. Yet, I find the goals of walkable and picturesque towns enviable. It’s the idea of a master plan that bothers me, rather than towns simply being organic. I think this, but I ironically live in a country where pretty much every town was centrally planned to at least some extent.

It is obvious that Romer’s charter cities would be master planned communities, after all he posits that that new cities spring forth from undeveloped land relatively quickly. In order to do this, someone will have say what gets built and where. Unfortunately, whenever I think of new construction lots, I think “stifling.” Houses built every two feet, all with the same floor plan and different permutations of the same three architectural choices. (Do you want your door solid, or with an oval window? Dormers or no? White or cream? Rollaway basketball rim on the left or right side of driveway? No I’m sorry, nothing permanent can be attached to the front of the house. We must think of the property values you know!) Worst of all, since HOAs aren’t the government, you have no protections, no representation, and no benefits, all for the low price of $250 and three headaches a year.

Sony announced the discontinuation of the Walkman. Like Christopher Hickey of Salon, I was surprised that they were still making them. Of course the world is not developed economies, so there is/was a market for them.

Throughout Hickey’s article, he linked to Walkman Central to highlight different models. It’s a site cultivated with the love and obsession that makes the Internet proud. Poking around I came a cross the PS-F9, portable phonograph. Ultimately impractical, it was only made in 1983. It featured next and previous song controls, and of course the exposed record and vertical orientation.

I’d love to have one of these, and put it next to a Teac X-2000R, but the only vinyl records I own are a possibly scratched “Ghostbusters” soundtrack and a sealed copy of R.E.M.’s “Monster”. Borrowing albums from my parents isn’t really an option, because with the notable exceptions of James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James,”, and “The Johnny Cash Show“, I’d be left with Englebert Humperdinck, the symphonic Beatles, and a “Teach Yourself Polish” album sans workbook. Well that’s not entirely true, there is “Tom Jones Sings She’s a Lady”, but it is quite a sad collection.

Design collaborative Mad Lab‘s chandelier Bacterioptica (located somewhere in New Jersey, much like Toxie. No, not that one, this one.) features exposed fiber optics (courtesy of Del Lighting) routed through petri dishes full of bacteria. As the bacteria colonies mature, the light is attenuated.

Mad Lab’s site implies that it’s available as a kit, but I don’t know if I want E. Coli hanging above the dinner table. Still, the light looks very cool, and I imagine that the light diffused through agar would be very interesting indeed.

Detail photo after the jump.
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I finally watched Eric Steel’s film The Bridge on Hulu. After reading this 2003 New Yorker article about Golden Gate Bridge suicide jumpers, Eric Steel set up cameras around the GGB to film the jumpers. He managed to film 23 of the 24 suicides in 2004, and in the process, annoy CalTrans for showing a part of the bridge experience that tourists shouldn’t see.

The film is fascinating, and thankfully doesn’t take the easy melodramatic or Helen Lovejoy approach. Steel treats the the subject, and everyone, involved with a distance that makes the film come off as more descriptive than anything. Other film makers may have turned the second half into a call for foxconn-esque nets.

When I first mentioned bridge jumpers, I said:

I [had become] enamored with the moment that the jumper’s center of gravity moves over the water, and the inevitable plunge begins. That moment, when your heart skips a beat, and your stomach tenses, and you think “Here we go!” It’s not the moment of total commitment. No, it’s the moment just after that. Did they intend to go just then, or were they just trying to get up the nerve when they slipped? More disturbingly, do they change their mind on the way down?

In the film, jump survivor Kevin Hines, recounts his experience. “[I] hurdled over the railing with my hands, and I was falling head first. And the second my hands left the bar – the railing – I said, ‘I don’t want to die. What am I going to do? This is it. I’m dead.’” Watching person, after person, simply turn, climb over the railing and immediately jump, I wonder how many of them were like him.

One that probably didn’t think twice was featured jumper Eugene Sprague. The interviews with Sprague’s friends, reveal a man that for years had decided to kill himself. He simply was waiting for the time to do it. He reminded me of my great aunt Doris. Aunt Doris, talked about suicide for years. She even tried a multiple times, while simultaneously teaching me lessons about suicide. Lessons like, cutting your wrists doesn’t work. You have to cut your elbows, or as they say, “Down the road, not across the street.” She taught me, that if you want to get hit by a train, you should check the train schedule first. Perhaps her best advice was when she told a 9 year old me, “Jonathan, if you ever want kill yourself, don’t try to electrocute yourself. It hurts like hell.” My response: “Oh, okay.” My mom and my great Uncle Lee, would take her to psychiatrists for years, but none of that helped. My mom says that eventually one of them simply said, that Aunt Doris would keep trying until eventually she succeeded.

On my birthday, (I think my 10th birthday), she came over and brought me a lava lamp, almost identical to the one that she had sitting in her living room. I thought her lava lamp was one of the coolest things around. When I opened the box, I was amazed. I couldn’t imagine ever getting something so grown up like a lamp. It was awesome. She said, sitting in the recliner of my parents’ living room. “I got you that so you’d have something to remember your crazy Aunt Doris by.” I was confused by the statement, but mostly just in awe of owning a lava lamp. I remember that my mom got up and left the room rather angrily, and I had no idea why. The next day, Aunt Doris shot herself in the heart with a pistol and died.

I still have the lamp.

Second in the series of indeterminate length, Recolonizing Detroit

The second story that spawned this series, was about Paul Romer’s “charter cities” idea. (Or as Metafilter put it, “neocolonial OCP-like company towns.“) Romer’s plan is get poor countries to cede governmental control of some unpopulated land to a rich foreign country and its investors, and let them build a city there. The city grows, becomes prosperous because capitalism and free markets, and then the rest of the country slowly begins to imitate the charter city. Essentially, he’s proposing creating a new Hong Kong, but without the warships and the opium.

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Martin Bahrij has designed a lamp with a parachute shade that can adjust the illumination by altering its shape. This reminds me of Kisa Kawakami’s Kisawings, which also varied the shade to adjust the lamp’s intensity. While servos to move the Kisawing panels would result erratic light patterns, simply using a servo to draw the shade closed on Bahrij’s lamp would have a much more predictable and expected behavior. It would be doubly nice if the servo and bulb were controlled through a conventional dimming switch.

Song Youzhou showed off his design for bus that allows traffic to pass underneath, at last May’s Beijing International High-tech Expo. The idea is passengers would board the bus at elevated stations, without interrupting traffic flow. Song proposes that streets be modified to either have rails for the bus to ride on (effectively turning it into a tram), or installing an optical guidance system (probably similar tot he one installed on some TEOR buses.) to aid in driving.

Song claims that Beijing’s Mentougou District (a Beijing suburb) will adapt 186 km of roads for the bus, beginning at the end of this year.

When I first saw the picture for this, I though that passengers would board at street level perhaps through either a stairwell mounted in the legs, or maybe retractable stairs. An elevating platform would available for wheelchair access. I’m kind of disappointed that this design requires elevated platforms, but it probably for the best. What will be interesting will be to see how drivers react to encountering one of these busses. The use of special traffic lights for cars under the bus, is a good idea.

It will be interesting to see if this is actually built, and if it is is widely adopted.

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The Mountain View Voice cover, is a story about a long shot plan to save Hanger One; have the Smithsonian build another a Air and Space Museum on the west coast.

Seriously.

Look, I love Hanger One. It’s one of my favorite landmarks in the Bay Area. I love that it is a testament to zeppelin aircraft carriers, I was surprised and dismayed to learn that it has been slated for destruction for years now. I’d love to see something come of the place, but asking for the Smithsonian to save it is dumb. It’s the sheer hubris of expecting the national museum to have something outside of the nation’s capital that gets me. Just buy a shuttle and store it there. Bam! Instant museum, and a hell of a lot better than the USS Hornet Museum with its mockups of famous artifacts. (Apollo capsule, I’m looking at you!)

No, Mountain View, you don’t get a Smithsonian, because you’re not Washington, D.C.

via Telstar Logistics