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.
Jianjun Chen in China proposed an interesting idea for eliminating station dwell times for trains. In his/her design, each train has a detachable boarding shuttle mounted on the roof of the train. Passengers who wish to disembark leave the main passenger compartment of the train, and enter the shuttle. Meanwhile, embarking passengers board an identical shuttle already located at the station. As the train approaches, the shuttle mounted on the train, disengages so it can slow to a stop at the station, while the shuttle is grabbed and mounted onto the moving train.
By using a separate boarding shuttle, passengers can board and unboard at their leisure, while transiting passengers can continue on their journey. By eliminating dwell time, passenger throughput can be increased, and travel times diminished. Chen calculates that such a system would would decrease the travel time between Beijing and Guangzhou from an estimated 8 hours to approximately five and a half, if five minute stops on all 30 intermediate stations were eliminated.
Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents are training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops, according to a recent report by a British-based media agency.
Reporters from the media agency spotted and took photos of a few “monkey soldiers” holding AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The report and photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world.
rAndom International unveiled xhibited “Swarm Light” (video and detail photo after the jump) at Design Miami / Basel last month. The installation consists of the three cubes of white LEDs. The LEDs are lit according to a flocking algorithm, and move in three dimensions around the cubes. Viewers can interact with the light by standing under the different cubes and by using sound to “scare” flock.
With hysteric cries of “socialism” and “communism,” penny wise and pound foolish austerity measures, the lionization of Ayn Rand style reductionist misanthropy, and the increasingly desperate attempts of governments to raise funds, this bench from Fabian Brunsing seems particularly apropos for the times.
Take a load off for a while, but only if you cough up € 0.50. What you thought benches were free? You know who else had free park benches? The Nazis.
What I like about this, is that it so completely embodies the anti-tax, anti-government mindset. (Interesting how often the question “Why should I pay to educated someone else’s child?” comes up, but “Why should I pay for police patrols across town?” or “Why should someone else pay for the government service I like?” never comes up.)
Of course, I’m simply projecting my own commentary onto the work, when it may not actually be the artist’s intent. Another possible inspiration for the bench is the passive aggressive antivagrant benches. Instead of simply having a benches uncomfortable for everyone, the bench is uncomfortable only for the indigent. As much as lament/despise bums (Santa Cruz will do that to you.), I’m always depressed by antivagrant design. It’s pigeon spikes for people, that typically aren’t actually hurting anything.
Searching around for a suitable example of a real antivagrant bench, I came across an orphaned page from, of all places, homepage of St Louis Loft Style. The page really does a great job of listing both antivagrant and vagrant friendly designs. Not just of benches and the like, but even devices that share building waste heat. It’s kind of inspiring.
Wow. I can really nailed that one. Apparently, the reviews were rather poor for it, in all fairness, I wasn’t thinking much about the phone, just the UI. The visualization of the lifestream was what was interesting, and there’s no reason why this idea can’t be applied to some other product.
Update: Wed Jul 7 15:13:28 PDT 2010 Microsoft sold 503. Ouch. Well I didn’t buy one.
MIT has published a paper entitled Programmable Matter by Folding (full article) that describes paper that can fold itself into a variety of shapes. The paper is covered by is divided into triangular sections that are joined by a network of thin nitinol actuators that contract under voltage. At the center of each section is a magnet that is used to retain the paper’s shape.
While I’m sure MIT had bigger plans for this tech (Well if it was the Media Lab, perhaps not.), I immediately thought that this was the perfect thing for synthetic plants. I’ve been thinking about how nitinol wires, or at least something like them, could deform a paper but thought that the being able to compresses only about 4% was a problem. When I first saw this video, I thought they were using something else besides nitinol, but they’re not. The trick they they used to get 180 degree bending is folding and annealing the 100μm foil so that the nitinol will remember the folded shape. Once it cooled, the foil is manually flattened, and then reheating the foil with electrical current will cause it return to the folded shape.
I managed to make my way up to San Francisco and see both the USS Bunker Hill and the Varyag. Unfortunately, there was a mixup about how long Russians were giving tours of the ship. Instead of going to 3 pm, they stopped at 1 pm. However, I did get some decent photos of the ship from the pier. For more detailed shots, I suggest you view the Chronicle’s pictures of ship. I did manage to take a tour of the Bunker Hill. We mainly stayed on the outside of ship, seeing the fore and aft vertical launch systems, the helicopter hanger, and also the bridge. About 350 crew members are on board, and about 40% of those are female. In 2008, the ship was the first Ticonderoga class cruiser to underwent an upgrade to its fire control systems, that allowed (in addition to other things) the ability of both the fore and aft 5 inch guns to be targeted independently. On of the new roles for the Bunker Hill is ballistic missile defense, and the ship is of the same type that recently shot down a satellite.
