Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 653

The Facadeprinter

*Look out, world.

facadeprinter.org - three stones from Facadeprinter on Vimeo.

via @_neural , who aptly remarks:

"The Facadeprinter is a simple robot. Its purpose: printing huge artworks out of its box onto the walls"

http://www.facadeprinter.org/en/index.php

Charles Babbage in Turin: the secret police reports

as published in Memorie e Lettere, Istituto Lombardo, Vol XXX, p83-166, in 1968. Translated by F. Oliveira-Pinto in his article "On a Visit by Charles Babbage to Turin in 1840″, in the Revista da Universidade de Coimbra, Vol XXXVI, pages 479-486, 1991.

From: The Royal Command of the City and Province of Turin, Police Department No. 6549

To: the First Secretary of State of the Home Office, Turin.

Turin, 21st September, 1840

Dear Sir:

The known Fortunato Prandi of Camerana, arrived here from Lyon ...

1.618: The Sustainable Luxury Fair

*That's right — it's sustainable luxury. And it's French.

http://www.1618-paris.com/concept_1618.php?lang=en

*You should see the green guys they hang out with.

http://twitter.com/1618Paris/following

*You know what would be really sustainably luxurious right now? A bauble even the world's biggest and most profitable corporations can't buy? A Gulf of Mexico without oil all over it.

Moo-Moo the Moscow Centipede Girl

*She's got cocaine, she's got cameras, she's on Facebook, and her handlers have YouTube.

*Sounds like somebody was rumbling through the old Christine Keeler files and thought, "You know what? This could work even better now! Get me a teenage model and a ditzy roommate who are up for anything."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1269496/Putin-critic-Viktor-Shenderovich-Katya-Gerasimova-honeytrap-sex-sting.html

The Archaeo-Linguistic Ghost of Neo-Colonialism

*I'm inclined to side with the poets, and take issues of linguistic clarity with a lethal seriousness… but this situation is getting so much weirder, at a rate we can scarcely describe. Language has been delaminated from regionality by digital culture. It will never be stapled back on there again.

*There must be a lot of places in this world — Burma and Afghanistan leap to mind — where Indian cultural power exports English and enforces it on non-Indian peoples. Then there are the Chinese, ...

Copenhagen Wheel

*Nifty piece of MIT design-fiction there. So expensive that you can buy one and build a bike around it.

*Actually, if you have a thousand of 'em you can apparently build a CITY around it.

http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2010...

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/1...

Ice printing

*Just has a certain all-organic, here-today melted-tomorrow niftiness.

http://fabbaloo.com/blog/2010/4/30/ice-printing.html

Augmented Reality: haptic flooring

*Tactile augmentation. Yeah man.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/25114/?a=f

(…)

"Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada have developed floor tiles that can simulate the look, sound and feel of snow, grass or pebbles underfoot. Such a tool could perhaps be used for augmented reality applications, tele-presence, training, rehabilitation or even as virtual foot controllers.

"The modular "haptic" floor tiling system is made up of a deformable plate suspended on a...

Web Semantics: speech in the cloud

*Now that there's a ton of voice traffic on the Internet, major-league search-engine techniques can be brought to bear on it.

*That's a little creepy.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/big-data-shakes-up-the-speech-industry.html

(…)

"Having speech technologies in the cloud lets Google quickly iterate and push enhanced speech engines on a regular basis. More importantly, their speech engines learn and get trained using real data from their many interconnected services. Speech engines typically...

Augmented Reality: show me the money

*Okay, it's a boring commercial press release. But it's also a business plan for actually making some money by augmenting reality.

Layar launches world's first Augmented Reality content store

Amsterdam, April 28th 2010.

Today Layar introduces a new revenue stream in Augmented Reality.

Publishers on the Layar platform now have the possibility to offer priced Augmented Reality experiences on multiple mobile platforms such as iPhone and Android. The content store is seamlessly integrated into...