Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 196

Intel Galileo Maker Sessions from Make

*That sounds pretty good. I may have to sign up for those using somebody else’s Google Plus address, since I refuse on principle to have one. I hear that Ed Snowden has a spare one.

http://makezine.com/2014/03/17/join-us-for-intel-galileo-maker-sessions-launching-thursday/

“The Getting Started with Intel Galileo Maker Sessions are just around the corner! For the unfamiliar, this three-week program will engage teams of makers around the world to participate in making using Galileo, Intel’s brand-new Arduino-compatible development board featuring Intel architecture. You can connect with other makers in the Google+ community and join us for our Thursday evening Hangouts On Air, when we all gather to hear from master makers about Galileo. The first Hangout On Air is this Thursday at 6pm PT from the Hybrid Lab at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. On Thursday, we’ll post more details about watching online. If you’d like to join in person at CCA, please register here.

“Registered teams started to receive their free kits complete with an Intel Galileo, components for prototyping, and digital copies of my upcoming book, Getting Started with Intel Galileo. Even though team registration is now closed, we welcome you to join our Google+ Community to interact with other makers who are interested in the board. We also invite you to watch the Thursday night sessions on Google+ Hangouts On Air. All of the recorded sessions and announcements for The Getting Started with Intel Galileo Maker Sessions will appear on the official page for the program.

“I look forward to making with you on Thursday!”

       

Augmented Reality: Samsung gesture recognition

*Typing on one’s own hands, instead of on a keyboard or a surface.

*But suppose you go into a space where someone has patented an alternative system of typing gestures, or, worse yet, you’re in a state of pirated gestures?

http://www.geek.com/mobile/samsung-wants-to-turn-your-hands-into-an-augmented-reality-keyboard-1586821/

(…)

“This idea essentially lets an augmented reality layer place a character on each section of your fingers and uses a camera to capture your thumbs interacting with those characters as though you were typing on a keyboard….”

(((The gif in this post is especially eerie.)))

       

Henry David Thoreau really despised popular novels.

*You can’t trust a guy with this attitude. It’s like meeting somebody who doesn’t like Led Zeppelin.

“I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is
in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of
one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and
foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear
read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book,
the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their
faculties in what is called easy reading.

“There is a work in several
volumes in our Circulating Library entitled “Little Reading,” which I
thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There
are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of
this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they
suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide
this provender, they are the machines to read it.

“They read the nine
thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none
had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run
smooth–at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and
go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better
never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly
got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to
come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again!

“For my part,
I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of
universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes
among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are
rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks.
The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the
meeting-house burn down. “The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the
Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of ‘Tittle-Tol-Tan,’ to appear
in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all come together.” All this
they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with
unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just
as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered
edition of Cinderella–without any improvement, that I can see, in the
pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting
or inserting the moral.

“The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of
the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all
the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and
more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven,
and finds a surer market.”

       

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Nervous System Kinematics Bodice

*Nice to see @nervous_jessica bravely acting as her own high-tech couture model for this possibly hazardous hinged nylon garment with about a zillion tiny pinch-points printed in it.

http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/blog/?p=4780

(…)

“What’s next

“We decided to first print a bodice to test our system before producing a gown. There were a large number of project elements to verify before proceeding with the costly enterprise of printing the dress. These include

“verify the accuracy of our 3D body scans
“check the fit of the garment on the person scanned
“judge how comfortable and wearable the piece is
“verify that our folding software isn’t producing intersecting or fused components
“learn of any issues on the fabrication side in terms of printing errors and depowdering procedures
“Now that all that is done we are ready to proceed with making a dress!

“Technical details
“Scanning – Kinect fusion scan of Jessica produced in our studio
“Design – Kinematics Clothing app (javascript, webGL)
“Folding – Kinematics Folding app (C++, openframeworks, ODE)
“3D-printing – printed by Shapeways in Long Island City, NY by SLS in nylon plastic

““Coding the Body” opening
“Come meet us and see the bodice in person (((probably that should be “On Person” as the bodice itself isn’t actually a person)))
“Wednesday March 19th, 2014
“from 6 to 8pm at apexart (291 Church St, New York, NY)”

       

Spime Watch: Building a Solid World

*Somehow I knew that the O’Reilly organization wouldn’t fail me with a “meme map.”

http://www.oreilly.com/solid/free/building-a-solid-world.csp?cmp=tw-na-free-product-sld14_building_a_solid_world

“Hi Bruce,

“Thanks for your download of an O’Reilly report. We hope you find it useful, and share it with your friends and colleagues.

“We wanted to make sure you knew about a few other resources that will help you stay up to date with the latest about the programmable world and the convergence of software + hardware. Here’s just a few ways you can get started:

“Get insights from our authors and editors about this topic on the O’Reilly Radar blog
“Connect with leading innovators and technologists at the O’Reilly Solid Conference
“Keep up with the latest news and get weekly updates delivered through the O’Reilly Solid newsletter
“Check out a sample newsletter >

“Thanks again and we hope you’ll check out some of these resources available to you.

“If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop us a line.”

Sincerely,
O’Reilly Media

       

Spime Watch: Revolv smart home automation solution

*It’s a kind of multiply-wireless hub for all, or at least some, of your gloriously incompatible Internet-of-Things home devices.

*If they were really an “internet” of things, presumably they’d be sharing an established “internet” protocol so they could talk to one another on a peer-to-peer foundation of net-neutrality. But are they? Heck no! Not even the Legacy Internet does that any more. Get ready to wrangle, wrangle, wrangle.

http://store.revolv.com/product/revolv-hub/

“Meet Revolv. With just one Hub and one App, the Revolv Smart Home Solution is your gateway to a unified experience with all your favorite connected home devices. With Revolv, you can program connected home devices to conveniently and simultaneously perform a variety of automated Actions, using any iOS6 (or higher) app enabled device. Revolv enables you to completely control your home automation experience in four ways: You can easily setup and schedule specific Actions to happen on certain days and times, you can have devices operate according to a ‘preset’ by tapping a single icon in the Revolv app, by motion or occupancy sensing, or you can have devices automatically operate when a you are nearing or leaving your home using your smart phone’s geo-location using our proprietary GeoSense technology. It truly is a revolution in home and lifestyle automation.

$299

“Smartphone App and Hub capable of automating virtually all (((

“Control all your devices including Philips Hue lights, Yale locks, Sonos Hi-Fi speakers, and Insteon sensors and switches.

“Easily create home automations based on triggers from sensors, time, GPS location, or on-demand presets.

“Start with 2-3 devices, and expand with more around your specific home and lifestyle needs…. (((etc etc)))

       

Architecture Fiction: New York City as a self-sufficient urban farm

*”A skyscraper devoted to meat production.” Hey, if it was corned beef, you might have something there, I dunno.

*I could read FastCo Design all day, really. It’s a good thing nobody pays me to do that, or I might never be seen again.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3027186/this-is-what-new-york-would-look-like-if-the-whole-city-was-a-giant-urban-farm

       

Climate crisis wrecking energy infrastructure

*Oil wars are wondrous things. Like carnivals of ruin.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/gao-climate-change-major-threat-to-energy-infrastructure-17159

“Oil refineries and drilling platforms in the U.S. are vulnerable to sea level rise and greater storm surge. Fuel pipelines, barges, railways and storage tanks are vulnerable to melting permafrost and severe weather. Warming seas and water shortages put nuclear and other electric power plants at risk. Power lines can be blown away by hurricanes and other extreme weather.

“In other words, all the infrastructure Americans rely on to heat their homes, power their lights and fuel their trains, trucks and cars is becoming more and more exposed to failure in a changing climate.

“That may seem clear to any one of the 1.1 million people who lost power in the New York area during and after Hurricane Sandy, but those are the conclusions of a U.S Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in January and just made public.

“The report summarizes much of the research published in recent years about the vulnerability of U.S. energy infrastructure to a changing climate. It is a response to a request from members of Congress for details about risks posed by global warming, how infrastructure can be adapted to withstand the ravages of a changing climate and what role the federal government plays in helping make the adaptation happen.

“The GAO report shows that climate change is a practical concern for U.S. energy producers and operators of energy transmission and distribution lines, said Klaus Jacob, a seismologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and an expert in climate change adaptation. Jacob is unaffiliated with the GAO and was not involved in the report.

“Multiple effects of climate change are likely to work together to threaten U.S. energy infrastructure, the GAO reported. Increased air and water temperatures are likely to wreak havoc on the U.S. electricity sector, helping to reduce water available for cooling electric power generators, reducing electricity supply while increasing consumers’ demand for electricity, the GAO said….”

       

Musica Globalista: Ghostly by ADULT, Mix for Moogfest 2014

*Fifty-one minutes.

ADULT. offers a new mix made entirely of Ghostly artists in anticipation of the Ghostly Stage at Moogfest this April 23-27, 2014.

Tracklist:
Jim Haynes “This is Radio Sweden”
HTRK “Poison”
Xeno & Oaklander “Par Avion”
Solvent “No One Should Be Living Here”
Brian Aneurysm “Das Element Des Menschen”
Matthew Dear “Anger Management”
JTC “Alpha Helix
Bodycode “Equidistant”
Audion “Motormouth”
2 AM/FM “Sweatbox”
Lowfish “No Longer Accepting Complaints”
John Foxx vs ADULT. “Tonight, We Fall”
Tropic of Cancer “More Alone”
Com Truise “Alfa Beach”
Shigeto “No Better Time Than Now”
Black Swan “Passing, Heartbreak”