robotmonkeys

the monkeys know all

Search results for: “people”

  • Areoshot

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    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.

    via grinding.be

  • Twine

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    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.)

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  • Voynich Manuscript

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    A few of years ago or so I became interested in the art of grimoires. The woodcuts of regular geometric shapes overlaid over demons or simply naked people. Codes. Magic. Dark conspiracies. Grimoires have it all.

    The ultimate book of magic is the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript. Discovered in 1912 in an antique bookshop, its authorship and meaning has never been clear. Written sometime between 1404 and 1438, its drawing appear to describe plants, biology, cosmology, and medicine. The text is either some sort of encryption, or maybe even meaningless asemic text.

    I first heard of the Voynich Manuscript overhearing a rather bizarre conversation between two older gentlemen at Sureshot coffee in Seattle the summer of 2008. One man was discussing some occult conspiracy of an that involved the Voynich Manuscript, an medieval immortality cult of serial killers, and the Zodiac Killer. I think Bohemian Grove entered in to it as well.

  • Ahh Hipsters

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    Vinyl

    “For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release,” said Matador’s Patrick Amory. “The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music.”

    Cassettes

    Children of the 80s, too, are affectionately revisiting the format on which they first discovered music. “What you grew up with just sounds right,” says 22-year-old Brad Barry, a student at the University of Texas who hosts a weekly cassette-only radio show called C60 Radio. Meanwhile, people who sport cassette-themed Urban Outfitters’ T-shirts or iPhone cases are just using it as a retro prop in the never-ending 80s revival.

    VHS

    “I enjoy the aesthetics of VHS,” said Josh Schafer, the founder of the horror magazine Lunchmeat. “I like putting it in the VCR and rewinding and pausing and fast-forwarding. It’s an experience nobody gets to do anymore because they consider VHS dead.”

    “I was not around during the main VHS boom, but I’ve never liked DVDs,” said [Louis Justin, the 21-year-old owner of the one-man company Massacre Video, in Michigan], who has a VHS tape tattooed on his arm. “When I was younger and I went to the record store, my parents would push me to get the CD, but I wanted the cassette. I’m an analog nerd.”

    Real musicians release on 8-track.

  • Mount Paektu

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    North Korean lore calls [Mt. Baekdu] the birthplace of Kim Jong-il, though Western experts say he was born in the Soviet Union.

    The Koreas are sending a joint research team to the active volcano Mt. Baekdu, located on the North Korean-Chinese border. Apparently, the North Koreans are concerned about the possibility of an eruption – or as they’d probably call it, a glorious tribute by nature to the Dear Leader.

    I find North Korea a very bizarre place; not only because of the “traffic girls” on empty streets, the lack of streetlights, the ubiquitous hand-drawn propaganda posters, and the comically bellicose official statements, but because of how the cult of personality is so entrenched in the culture. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand how it would even enters someone’s mind to say something so absurd like saying a halo appeared over the birthplace of a leader. Yet, there are those people that believe it. (There are always true believers.) I think it’s the same problem I have with religion. It’s just so patently absurd, the only honest reaction is to laugh.

    Of course North Korea’s propaganda ministry isn’t the most absurd. That one goes to the late Saparmurat Niyazov‘s lackeys in the Turkmenistan. Niyazov wrote his “Book of the Soul”, and then proceeded to order it placed in mosques next to the Koran. He ordered a golden statue built and made to rotate with the sun. He ordered his picture be placed in all government buildings, and to run constantly in the corner on state television station. Most famously, he ordered the names of the months and days of the week changed. Most interestingly, this last one wasn’t his idea. It was proposed by Ahmet Çalık, a Turkmen oligarch sucking up to Niyazov.

  • “No Man. No Problem.”

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    Fourth in the series of indeterminate length, Recolonizing Detroit

    The root cause of the problems Paul Romer encountered in Madagascar was the local population. So how about founding these cities not just in unpopulated areas, but in areas people do not identify with as well? Could this be effective? From the European perspective, that’s what the era of colonization was, but most of us have a more expansive view of ownership now. Today, the only land that doesn’t have recognized claims on is Antarctica (Actually, it’s a bit more complicated on that, but more on that later.), but that location is not likely to attract many people to it. What if instead of land, these cities were built in international waters, or somewhere else unclaimed by any country? What then?

    That’s right, we’re talking about micronations.
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  • Interesting, Yet Outdated, Furniture

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    Writing about traveling bookcases and other dead media storage solutions got me thinking about other furniture that always seems pregnant with possibilities, yet just isn’t practical anymore: secretary desks, and travel desks.

    I love all the cubby holes in the secretary desks. Holes full of letters, bills, and checks. Drawers containing pens, ink wells, and seals. All of it lockable. Its very structure conveys, “Important stuff happens here.” Need to do serious work on the go? Get a travel desk, the attache case’s awkward cousin.

    While tasks like answering correspondence and paying bills have remained, the form they have taken has changed. No longer are we physically shuffling atoms around, but rather simply information. Email, online banking, and all the rest has replaced paper. Similarly, we no longer need travel desks, as our laptop contains everything that the desk, could and much more. Add a network connection, and almost nothing is out of reach. It seems increasing clear that physical media is dying. Newspaper circulation is down. CD sales have fallen. DVD and bluray are now seen as a transition technology as streaming is becoming increasingly widespread. (Thus Netflix’s price hike.) With the advent of eReaders and tablet computers, even the books and magazines seems in danger.

    We’re losing the need to deal with physical items, and as a side effect, it seems like we’re losing an ability to signal our tastes; which is ironic, given how personalization and sharing has taken over the web. When visiting someone’s home, we would occupy ourselves by perusing each other’s bookshelves. The books, CDs, and DVDs were essentially the tag clouds of the physical world. They weren’t there just for storage, but also to signal our personality. Our collections not only express how we see ourselves, but also how we want others to see us.

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  • So Long Shuttle…

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    So today was the last shuttle mission. I remember my mom waking me up early that April morning and asking me if I wanted to watch real spaceship launch. Of course I did. We went into the living room, and sat in front of that old black and white television we had, and watched it live on channel 12. I may have had the first of my die cast space shuttles with me as we watched it. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my 5 year old life. I was a huge space geek then, and remained so up until sometime in high school I guess. We bought that day’s issue of the Southern Illinoisan, and I kept that folded yellowed displayed on my bedroom bookshelf for years. The front page had a large four color crew photo under the headline. That was unusual, as color printing wouldn’t become common for maybe ten more years. There was another story on the front page. It was about the latest developments in the Atlanta child murders.

    Two days later, I watched the spacecraft that launched like rocket, land like an airplane.

    Seven years later, after attending Space Camp, I witnessed the launch of STS-26, the first flight after the Challenger disaster. We were a few miles away, on shore of some inlet at Kennedy. My friend Billy got the passes by writing our congressman. We watched the launch through binoculars, and was looking directly over the top of the orbiter, just like on television. Over loud speakers, we heard the countdown, watched the boosters ignite, and then shuttle rise from its plume of steam and fire. Seconds later, we were hit with a wall of intense heat and noise. I didn’t expect that. We tracked the craft as it moved higher and further away until it disappeared behind a cloud. Behind the cloud, the SRBs separated, and the shuttle emerged, it was only barely pinpoint of light.

    Then it rained. Apparently, a common, yet relatively unknown, but obvious, side effect of shuttle launches. Mix liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and what do you get?

    And now the shuttle is gone. Of course the shuttle was oversold. It never launched every week. It never carried enough payload. It tried to be all things to all people, and of course never completely satisfied anyone. Yet, it was an honest to god spaceship.

    The designs for the shuttle replacement Orion / MPCVSpaceX’s Dragon, and Boeing / Bigelow’s CST-100 all are just capsules that seem like 1950s technology. While I don’t doubt they’re more practical, they seem disheartening. We’ve come a long way from the days of the “National Areospace Plane” (I always found it a bit weird that the artist depictions always made it look like Air Force One.)

  • Pandora’s Vox

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    From Carmen Hermosillo’s (aka humdog) 1994 essay Pandora’s Vox

    i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

    Seventeen years later, it’s still the same, but in one sense it’s worse. Before it was just selling ads based on traffic. Now we’re processing the text of your posts for sentiment. Processing your social connections to determine whether your or one of your friends are more of an “influencer.” We’re trying to peer into meaning. Typically the concerns about text-mining / social-network-analysis / big-data revolve around privacy, which I believe mostly clouds the issue.

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  • Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

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    It is the year 2011, and I now have a robot maid. Alas, it does not have a sassy voice, and even though it comes in sexy black, it does not come with a french accent either. Mostly it just beeps, like robots from a long time ago, but occasionally it does speak in a feminine voice, but only to chide me. (“Error one. Please move Roomba to a new location and press the ‘clean’ button.”) It’s definitely not fast, and it’s not thorough, since there are some places too small for it to fit, but I do like that I don’t have to vacuum. My favorite thing it does is how it desperately tries to claw its way back to the charging station if you try to drag it away so you can work on it. That said, I still will be eagerly awaiting the commercial arrival of a Mahru-Z like bot.

    Opening the box, I found this sticker on one of the plastic bags:

    This robot contains an electronic and software interface that allows you to control or modify its behavior, and remotely monitor its sensors. For software programmers interested in giving Roomba new functionality, we encourage you to do so.

    Because the functionality of iRobot Roomba can be changed by you or other third parties, usage of this Roomba is subject to the enclosed End User License Agreement. If you do not accept this agreement, please do not open this package. For more information, visit www.irobot.com

    Now that’s nice. More companies should take a pro-hacker stance. A “you assumed the risk” stance towards added functionality is great. If Igive them money, and don’t ask for support, then why should they care what I do? I’d love to be able to download a a more efficient floor covering algorithm to it, perhaps even have actually remember the shape of the rooms from run to run. Unfortunately, the hacking sites are filled with lameness like adding Knight Rider lights, and Maybe there’s a community of people doing useful things, but somehow I doubt it.

    March 20, 2011

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