The Transparency Grenade by Julian Oliver is a “weapon” for radical transparency. A case modeld after a Soviet F1 hand grenade contains a gumstick linux computer with wifi and an integrated microphone. The gumstick packet sniffs the wireless network while simultaneously streaming the ambient audio to a remote server for analysis. (Essentially, the gumstick is running DriftNet or EtherPEG.) In an interview with We-Make-Money-Not-Art, Oliver says that he wanted to make the “information war” a bit more visual and iconic.
The Transparency Grenade was made for Weise 7, an artist collective in Berlin, and their Labor 8 exhibition. The exhibition features a the nexus of technology and surveillance.
Dr. Mark Post‘s lab at Maastricht University has created meat in a vat. The press is calling it “hamburger,” so I guess it is cloned bovine muscle. In a 2009 Wired interview, Post said that the problems facing in vitro meat is creating the texture. Taste is of little concern because, “The food industry is already expert at enhancing taste.”
Frank Ritter and Kuo-Chuan “Martin” Yeh professors in Penn State’s Applied Cognitive Science Lab, have developed a free iOS app Caffeine Zone 2 that tries to help you optimize your caffeine intake. The user enters his/her weight, and then notifies the app every time he/she consumes caffeine. The app estimates how much caffeine is in the user’s blood based what was consumed when, and the user’s mass. The app can warn the user if the amount of caffeine in the user’s system rises or falls below an optimal range, an notification can by pushed to the user. Additionally, the app can warn the user if his/her caffeine density is expected to impact the user’s sleep.
Areoshot is inhalable caffeine. For $2.99 you get 100 mg of caffeine (the same as a cup of coffee) and B vitamins, but divided into four doses. It was invented by a Harvard professor David Edwards, and it’s manufactured in a real factory, so I suspect that it’s safer than freebasing caffeine in your kitchen.
While novel caffeine delivery vectors have been around before, what I love about this is the moral panic that Chuck Schumer is trying to stir up about it. ZOMG! Someone may use it stay awake and drink alcohol! I take it that Chucky isn’t a fan of irish coffee then. There’s two things that bother me about Schumer’s comments. First it’s the alcohol, not the caffeine that’s the problem. Presumably Schumer wouldn’t have a problem with someone staying awake and doing something wholesome. Of course we can’t blame the alcohol here, because alcohol is all-American, this is just letting someone pervert its wholesomeness. The other thing about Schumer’s comment that bothers me is the undercurrent is the old puritan fear that someone is having fun, which is a bit ironic given that Schumer is Jewish. It reeks of the argument medical marijuana that it’s simply a canard, and that people getting the cards aren’t really sick, but rather are just people that want to get high. To which I say, So what? The argument makes pleasure naughty, as if that’s a bad thing. Contrary to the puritans, that’s simply not true.
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).
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.)
Another feature of the CNN webpage exclusive to the American edition: games! Given this and the numerous examples of US versus the world magazine covers, it makes me wonder if the major media companies are even trying to inform.
The winner of this year’s James Dyson Award, Edward Linnacre’s Airdrop is a device that extracts water from air for use as in irrigation. If this sounds, like a Tatooine moisture farm, it should. However, unlike Uncle Owen’s GX-8 water vaporator, the Airdrop doesn’t use refrigerant, but rather the temperature differential from air to soil.
The Airdrop consists of a small reservoir buried about two meters in soil. Rising out of the tank and up to the surface is a cylinder containing a copper coil filled with copper ball bearings used in home distilleries. The copper tubing continues up to a turbine like those used on attic vents, but with the vanes turned around so that air is driven into the tubing instead of out of it. Also in cylinder is a submersible pump that transfers water from the tank to a drip irrigation line. The pump is controlled by an embedded microcontroller and solar powered. In times of little wind, the turbine can be powered by an electric motor.
Hacker / Fashion designer Diana Eng created a thermographic scarf that reveals snowflakes at temperatures less than 65 degrees fahrenheit. (Video after the jump.)
It reminds me a bit of Hypercolor shirts, but actually pretty cool.
