Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 747

Neill Blomkamp, director of DISTRICT 9

*I see. Hmmm. Haven't seen the big movie yet, but I'm starting to get what they mean:

Italian Schismatic Transhumanists

(((I assume this means they are turning into two different transumanisti species. I could be wrong there.)))

From: Giancarlo Stile, PhD

Dear Bruce, (((Buongiorno!)))

I'm just noticing your post about Italian transhumanists here:

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyon...

and just would like let you know that here in Italy there are two different transhumanist organizations (http://humanityplus.org/get-involved/... the Associazione Italiana Transumanis

Solido laminated-plastic fab

*I've seen fabs that use glued paper sheets, but I've certainly never seen this method before. A plastic roll, a cutting knife, and glue-pens. Could you *get* any more Favela Chic than this? Maybe with a RepRap made entirely of rebar, chicken-wire and spit… but this Solido thing is so entirely Commercial-Off-The-Shelf. So mass-produced and just-good-enough. Get it, use it, dump it.

*Totally digging the Cyrillic subtitles. They transform a bland piece of corporate video PR into a SPOOK COUNT

Los Angeles, the continuing climate crisis

*Austin is cruelly drought-stricken and on water rationing, but I've also been known to dwell in Pasadena. Check out the San Gabriel mountains this season:

Time Lapse Test: Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

*Not eerie and menacing enough for you? Try this one:

Time Lapse Test: The Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

*They've evacuated the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena due to these fires, so the Martian rovers have stopped moving due to what you just saw up there.

*Enjoy An

It's a robot made of slime mold.

*Okay, come on, how could I not blog this.

http://www.physorg.com/news170865567.html

(…)

"This new plasmodium robot, called plasmobot, (((it had to have a cute neological name))) will sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers. (((Sort of.))) The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of

An ice fab

*Fabricating with ice. It's one of those niche academic-lab schemes that might turn out be really handy somewhere sometime, like, say, on the surface of a Saturnian moon or something.

*Maybe fabricating giant pykrete battleships to feed a future Los Angeles with potable water. "You shipped us water?" "No man, the water *is* the ship."

http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~rmsl/Index/ice/index.html

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/computer-assisted_ice_construction.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Réalité augmentée: virtual mirror for trying on glasses

Miroir virtuel essayage de lunettes - Réalité augmentée
di DreamInReal

*There's been so much fuss about head-mounted AR displays that it's fun to see the fuss inverted: fake glasses installed on somebody's head by a screen-based system.

"Système innovant d'essayage virtuel de lunettes à base de technologies de réalité augmentée. La caméra reconnaît instantanément n'importe quel visage et insère en temps réel une paire de lunettes modélisée en 3D, hyper-réaliste mais entièrement virtuelle…"

Cheap, simple, good-enough, low-end semi-junkola technology

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough

"… it's happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.

"The good news is that this trend is ideally suited to the times. (((Yup. Sure is. It's also ideally suited to huge populations outs

Help Jonah Destroy the Art Museum

http://www.random-magazine.net/2009/08/alerting-infrastructure/

Alerting Infrastructure! By Jonah Brucker-Cohen - The best free videos are right here

Augmented reality: geek to chic

*Nice to see augmented reality design jargon flourishing in such short order: Head-Up Display, Tricorder, Holochess, and X-ray Vision; Loner, Second Hand Smoke, Pay No Attention To the Man Behind the Curtain, The Invisible Man!, Tunnel Vision, and AR for AR's Sake.

http://www.joelamantia.com/user-experience-ux/geek-to-chic-cultural-branding-of-augmented-reality-experiences

(…)

"Connecting the Apple brand to augmented experiences will persuade many people to try out AR. Yet as I've said, and many