Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 765

The Registry of Standard Biological Parts

*I guess one needs a registry of standard biological parts, but those icons that

reduce living tissue to conceptual nuts and bolts are a tad disquieting. It's like

waking up in the morning and realizing you're "Mr. Potato Head."

http://partsregistry.org/Catalog

*There are definite upsides to this technology, though, like my throwaway-bottle

"window farm" that's been biologically upgraded to grow tear-gas and live bacon bits.

Dead Media Beat: Mailboxes

*They're ripping mail collection boxes out of the ground, just like they did with public phone booths…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/24/AR2009072403857.html

(…)

"In the past 20 years, 200,000 mailboxes have vanished from city streets, rural routes and suburban neighborhoods — more than the 175,000 that remain. In the Washington area alone, half the blue boxes that were on the streets nine years ago have been pulled up and taken to warehouses to molt in storage or be s

The 100 things that Geekdad's geek kids will never know about

*Dead media, mostly. A LOT of dead media.

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/100-things-your-kids-may-never-know-about/

Audio-Visual Entertainment
1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today's teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its f

Maybe creeping featuritis isn't that bad after all

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx...l

"About myTexts

"Less is more, as Mies van der Rohe would say. (((Hey, yeah! Great!))) This is not only true in architecture; this is especially the case when it comes to writing. Thus, myTexts helps you to get more meaning out of your words with less distraction.

"With myTexts you focus almost automatically on writing. You simply don't have to care about windows, buttons or formats. Your Mac turns into a truly typewriter again

Blobitecture and Parametrics

*What happens when parametric architecture gets too cheap and too easy? Karrie Jacobs wonders.

*I think I already know, but it's nice to see the issue being raised here. Note that the cover of this month's METROPOLIS is a "twenty-thousand-dollar house" made out of scrap. Is there a reason that isn't parametric technokitsch scrap yet? Yes… because it isn't 2015 yet.

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20090722/off-the-shelf-genius

(…)

"On my first day at SmartGeometry, I sat through six hours of p

Texas drought not yet the worst drought ever recorded

*It is, however, the hottest and the weirdest. Can you say "Greenhouse Effect"? Not if you're the Governor of Texas.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/07/23/0723drought.html

Drought not one for the ages yet

But LCRA officials say we're seeing more heat, less rain than in 1950s.

By Asher Price

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Thursday, July 23, 2009

"The drought that has gripped Central Texas is approaching the severity of Texas' most famous drought, the one that sucked the land

The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket of Franklin Chang-Diaz

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17476-ion-engine-could-one-day-power-39day-trips-to-mars.html

*It'll get you to Mars in 39 days. Hey, 39 days to go freeze and jump around on Mars? If that's all it takes, some rich dot-com geezer is gonna do it.

*A variable specific-impulse magnetoplasma rocket. It's sure got a cool 21st century name. You gotta figure there'd be all kinds of Wernher Von Braun screamin'-out-of-the-sky spin-offs for most anything called "magnetoplasma."

*I'm putting this one

Spime Watch: Tweetjects

*This one's good, too.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_tweeting_house_twitter_internet_of_things.php

"Stanford-Clark has set up various systems for real-time monitoring of the Internet of Things, many of them using Twitter (he calls the resulting tweets "tweetjects"). One example got a bit of mainstream media coverage lately: a house that uses Twitter to monitor its energy consumption…."

Spime Watch: IBM and Internet of Things

*The thing that's endearing about IBM is their deployment of real money. Like, megatons of money. Plus swarms of real-world machinery and thousands of actual engineers.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ibm_internet_of_things.php

(…)

"I recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Yesterday we wrote about how Stanford-Clark has hooked his house up to Twitter. Today we delve more into what his employer, IBM, is doing with the Internet of Things.

"IB

Obligatory Snake Robot Video

*Good thing that baby's still got a tether, as it's kinda the parkour version of urban robotics.

*Don't wanna be down on our friends the snakes here; this device might be beneficial for catching and cannibalizing illegal "rat robots."

*Thanks @eileen_gunn!