Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 779

It’s sustainable design day here at Lift France 09

#liftfrance09 on Twitter.

Just getting going this morning but… wait a sec, was that a Turinese hydrogen car?

From *General Motors*? Wow, anything is possible these days:

http://www.gmeurope.info/social_media...

General Motors and Regione Piemonte today unveiled a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle which could become part of the first real-world demonstration program in Italy.

GM’s fourth generation fuel cell electric vehi

Heading for #liftfrance09 in Marseilles

This ought to prove edifying.

http://www.liftconference.com/

Paris, Spring 2019

*Well, that was calming and refreshing.

*Via We Make Money Not Art. I can’t keep up. Can anyone? There are whole

universes in there.

Cellphone becomes ‘air pen’

http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/forthcoming_air_writing_lets_you_wield_the_cell_phone_like_a_pen_13792.asp

“List of Objects Subsumed by the Cell Phone: Camera, camcorder, calculator, computer, Walkman, wallet, newspaper, and now…pen? A new technology called “air writing” aims to use a cell phone’s built-in accelerometer to enable the entire phone to be used like a pen, producing messages scrawled in mid-air.

“Speed writers may still want to stick with texting for now, because air-writers

Viral anime skreemin’ mashup techno break

*This thing has been viewed over one million times. It has dozens of

slightly-mutated Youtube offspring.

*I’m not even sure this is the first one. It looks more highly-evolved

than a dandelion.

Open-sourced, leased, ultracapacitive, regenerative, and British

*Okay, it’s also a car. The part about its being a car is the far-fetched part.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-06/17/british-team-unveils-hydrogen-fuel-cell-car.aspx

Warning! Addictive Musical Webtoy!

*I told you! Think twice before you click on this. Think three times!

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix

Italian Maker kid

http://www.libero-news.it/pills/view/13818

*I don’t wanna scold the keen ingenuity of Leonardo 19-year-old Da Vinci here,

but he built a potato-gun out of spray-cans and plastic sewer pipes and he set it

off *inside a condo in Rome.* So the Roman cops naturally busted him and his

friends and rounded up all his pirate destructo-files.

*Look, kids: that’s what squats are for. You wanna break into the giant
abandoned industrial building so as to blow yourself up like a lunatic. Knock it
off with doi

Unmanned cocaine submarines, the narcoworld’s Predator hardware

http://crimeconflictnexus.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/cocaine-submarines/

(…)

“It’s common to think of drug smuggling as a low-tech process — it’s human mules swallowing cocaine, or donkeys loaded with opium. Maybe trucks or boats or small airplanes. These subs may not measure up to US naval standards, but they’re not exactly floating buckets either:

“These vessels are intelligently designed. They are not very comfortable, but they are now very seaworthy. They are capable of carrying multi-ton cargos.

Spime Watch: FoodReg and TraceTracker

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227126.500-barcodes-could-reveal-your-foods-credentials.html

(…)

“Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID chips to track their products. But with the help of cheap cellphone and internet access it is becoming possible to collate data from remote locations around the world and make it available to the people who are actually going to eat the food.

“In many cases manufacturers are alive to the notion that transparency about the source of their food is g