Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 764

Time is unkind to 40-year-old spacesuits

http://zoharesque.blogspot.com/2009/07/preserving-spacesuits-and-tranquility.html

(…)

She even has under her care the suit worn by Neil Armstrong when he stepped out on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, and made history as the first man to walk on the moon.

But she agrees the passage of time has not been kind to these historic artifacts. "They don't do well because of the light and the humidity," she said. "They are made out of 21 layers of synthetic material. They are brittle," she said, adding

New paper furniture

*Extraordinary claims for the recycled-paper-and-glue technology here.

Paper desks, tables, bookcases, that's putting the ol' chic into Favela Chic.

http://www.waybasics.com/shop/limited-editions-c-45.html

*While you're at it, light up your recycled paperboard boudoir with these

recycled plastic pop bottles. Via Yanko Design.

http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/07/28/recycled-lights/

*Get your walls for the lights and the furniture, right here.

http://transmaterial.net/index.php/2009/07/26/paper-softwal

Sand and pixels, together at last

http://www.cscoutjapan.com/en/index.php/qr-code-sand-castle-by-sinap/

New Media Medicine

New Media Medicine from nextlab on Vimeo.

"Sorry Julie. You got fired and have no health insurance. It'll be me, the cute talking-head expert system, and you and that diabetes from now on."

Spime Watch: Bokodes

*Yet another visual tagging system usable by handhelds, and this one seems to have some unique and interesting affordances.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8170027.stm

I can think of about a billion reasons not to build E. coli from scratch

*Reason #1: E coli bacteria live in our guts. Want a mutant one that makes botulism toxin that kills swiftly, with massive lethality? Hey, no problem!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17514-evolution-machine-speeds-up-search-for-better-bugs.html

*Then again, this massive broadscale mutation technique looks plenty cheap and highly suitable for a favela bathtub, so what the heck, boys, have at it!

They call it the Flying Laptop

*If they ever manage to build and launch a "flying laptop," it'll be promptly pwned and put in a "flying botnet."

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/deltav/23889/?nlid=2210

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Reprogramming Satellites during Flight

New research shows that a space probe's hardware could be reconfigured on the fly.

By Brittany Sauser

Researchers in Germany have developed satellites that can be radically reconfigured in orbit. The approach could ultimately lead to multitasking satellites capable

Electronica, Chilean poetry and the surface of the sun

*This was going on for four billion years before the advent of music or poetry.

To Octavio Paz from Alexander Trevi on Vimeo.

http://pruned.blogspot.com/2009/07/wo...

Dreaming of a peer to peer world

*I like the way this Bauwens guy talks. Not that I believe in his speculative peer-to-peer politics or anything; I just simply like the way that he talks.

* "I'd like a grilled cheese sandwich please." "That will require some voluntary permissionless self-aggregation around the production of common value." "Okay, can I have a bag of popcorn then?" "Certainly, as soon as our hyper-productive peer to peer dynamics grow from seed form to parity form." The ol' sci-fi dialogue practically writin

The Mexican Government Spent All the Drug Money, Your Honor

*One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. I guess if one snorted a few sticky brown rails of Sino-Mexican meth, maybe some mad cackling Hunter Thompson-style laughter might be in order before one's teeth fell out.

*One has to wonder what it's like to *be* Zhenli Ye Gon. He must be pretty used to the slammer by now, but when his eyes open in the morning in his cell, how does he assemble his internal narrative? "Time to head for Mexico and tackle those weapons charges." They pulled 200 million