Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 780

A camera woven out of fiber

*I would call this totally weird, if I hadn’t been writing science fiction about

all-fabric computers for ages now. “Camera as furoshiki.” Okay, sure,

bring the noise, MIT.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22870/

(…)

Fabien Sorin, the postdoctoral researcher who developed the fiber camera, says that he made a 36-by-36 grid of fibers and connected the fiber’s semiconducting sensors to electrodes. When light hits the semiconductors, it displaces electrons within the material, creating an e

America is losing its industrial capacity to ship astronauts

*Which is kind of embarrassing. Still, if you somehow need American live bodies

in outer space, can’t the government just pony up a modest sum and have

the Russians ship them as space tourists? That’s absurdly cheap compared

to the price of one shuttle.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/22869/?nlid=2108

“A 10-person committee charged with reviewing the future of U.S. human spaceflight will hold its first public meeting today, beginning a process that must cover a lot of territory in ver

You say that bacteria have… what the hell! They do WHAT?!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/ftf-gorby/

*Bacteria network themselves together by growing tiny iron wires, and then they ship electricity around *between species*? Like freakin’ bacterial electrical utilities, this is what you’re telling me? And they’ve been doing this since the early pre-Paleolithic and this is the first time we ever got around to noticing?

“Demonstrating that bacteria can communicate using integrated neurobiological circuitry will be no easy feat, but success in th

Dead Media Beat: MySpace

*Well, that’s sure looking pretty ugly. And to think that blogs were supposed to look all creaky and old-fashioned compared to MySpace.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-myspace17-2009jun17,0,6726077.story

(…)

“The history of social networks suggests that these sites have the fleeting popularity of a trendy nightclub. The site that’s recognized as the birthplace of online communities, the Well, (((as in bruces@well.com))) gave way to the more broadly available America Online, which was ec

More augmented urbanism oozing from purses and pockets

*I see a lot of these, but this one is spooky. Maybe because it is so divorced

from the desktop computer paradigm.

*Also, the pricing feature is hairy. I don’t think I’ve ever read an AR scenario

where people walk around projecting price-tags onto stuff, but it’s

so late-modern-capitalism that it seems stupid to have overlooked that.

You could just walk out every day and watch your neighborhood’s real-estate

prices decline. What could be more 2010?

“Dutch launch
“The premier launch is for the Du

Steampunk break

*World needs more European steampunk. Enough with the

Anglophone stuff already.

*Got a very Max Ernst SEMAINE DE BONTE feeling in these.

http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/le_petit_journal/

3d Organ Bio-Printer in Action

*Okay, it’s a tad blue-sky, but I really like the look of that fabricator.

That gizmo’s not exactly “printing organs” — it’s stereolithographing

layered clumps of living organ cells separated

with paper-thin sushi-wrapping — but hey, what’s wrong with that?

Load it up with some turkey cells and you could, like, print out turkey bacon.

The least appropriate tweets from the big Twitter conference

*It’s the “140 characters” conference in New York City today, and the attendees (and their followers) are tweeting like there is no tomorrow. People are complaining that they can’t hear the speakers for the eager rattling of Twittering keyboards.

http://140conf.twazzup.com/

*And what are they saying? Maybe 200 tweets a minute, and that’s just with the

#140conf hashtag:

This place is a sea of laptops! #140conf is packed solid!

#140conf no sooner I than said the video feed was working well it went s

GOP Warlords vs the Cybernetic Monkey-Men

*This satire really ought to seem funny to me. It has every kind of mordant, off-the-wall gesture toward humor that I commonly make myself. This must be a guy with a very similar sensibility to mine, who simply has a rather different ideological take on contemporary events.

*I’m not saying I’d roll on the floor over this, but I ought to be able to see it as
political humor. Hard to do that. Really feels like this guy wants to immolate
himself and everybody around him. I get the same feeling fr

I’ll let the furniture speak for itself here

http://www.fabbaloo.com/2009/06/chair-made-of-itself.html