Jakkyn

SUBMISSION: Disassembled electronic connector.  Photo by John Bernardo Photography

Nuit 

Hey, that’s my bike

Tehran

Land of the lost, Hubert Blanz

Hey Bruce!

I’m dropping you an email, because…

I finally finished to make my first feature film. I have a couple of movie projects in the pipeline, but they are all so big and hard to finance, and will take more time… and out of sheer frustration we made a feature film, shot in only 5 days, with a budget of only 5000 EUR. Damn, that was something, but also exciting, and I’m happy with it.

It’s a no-budget post-apocalyptic fantasy agitprop comedy extravaganza called “Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl”.

Just a plot teaser:

The growing tension between the last two remaining superpowers -­ China and Google -­ escalates in the early 21st century, and results in the global inferno of the “Google Wars”. But the years go by, radioactive dust settles on old battlegrounds, and a New World rises from the ashes of the old.

Fratt Aigner, a seedy journalist, and Alalia Grundschober, a nerdy technician, live and work in Mega City Schwechat: the biggest semi-urban sprawl in the foothills of what remained of the Alps. Newspaper mogul Thurnher von Pjölk assigns them a special task: to venture into the boondocks of the Gstetten and find the legendary Echsenfriedl. It is the beginning of a journey full of dangers, creatures and precarious working conditions.

We created it for ORF (Austria’s PBS), where it first aired in March 2014 — and we even won a small award for it. But we also submitted it to a bunch of film festivals all around the globe…

Nice side story: We were brainstorming how to get a bit more money for the project.

So we added a text insert into the film, one similar to watermarks used in festival viewing copies. The text insert asks the viewer to report the film as copyright infringement by calling a premium-rate phone number (1.09 EUR/minute). And when the film aired on Austrian national television, people really called the number to report us (!). So we co-financed the film with proceeds from the premium-rate number. I call this new strategy ‘crowdratting.’

Anyhow, here is the website: http://monochrom.at/gstettensaga/

And IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3296276/

And of course it’s already on PirateBay (whoever leaked it: feel free to share): http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/9902996/Die.Gstettensaga_-_The.Rise.of.Echsenfriedl_-_2014.EngSubs.HDRip

The current buzz-topic of the month is Thomas Piketty's magisterial tome, Capital in the 21st Century—currently at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, #5 in the UK, and in the sights of every right wing pundit, goldbug, and economic quack globally.

I have not read Piketty (yet) so I am about as unqualified to comment on his central thesis as anyone. But I've read the reviews, so I'm going to bloviate anyway—about the implications for a topic I occasionally obsess over, like a diseased cur chewing on an ulcerated hernia.

Piketty's central thesis (at second hand) appears to be that in an era of slow economic growth (like the 21st century to date) characterised by high rates of return on investment (ditto) the rate of capital formation outstrips the rate of wealth creation, leading to centralization of wealth and an increasing gap between the rich and the rest of us. Marketization and trickle-down economics have signally failed to close this widening divide, and so it follows that the deregulation of trade and investment and the reduction in taxation of assets that have typified the past forty years are damaging to the social fabric; if we want to reduce inequality we will have to go after the capital concentrations with a pointy expropriative stick. (Cue right-wing/libertarian meltdown in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...)

This interests me because it looks like a really fascinating opportunity for an experiment in libertarian paternalism.

I believe we can safely say that the custodians of those huge steaming piles of money that are sucking yet more money into their orbit like so many fiscal neutron stars will resist any attempt to take their shinies away, by any means—fair or foul. It doesn't matter whether the money can actually buy them anything useful—arguably in billion-up concentrations it can't: go ask Steve Jobs how much being CEO of AAPL extended his life expectancy—or even whether you own it (ask the board of the Welcome Foundation, for example); but you don't get to be in charge of a giant heap of green folding paper by giving it away at every opportunity.

But is it possible to persuade them to do something useful with their capital? (And by "persuade" I mean hold a gun to their head: compulsory nationalization and redistribution without compensation, or invest in something useful and at least nominally retain ownership of the investment ...) What if we offer them tax breaks for investing in some really long-term project that doesn't necessarily offer them a return on investment any faster than the overall GDP growth rate, but which protects the nominal long-term value of their assets while ultimately growing the size of the economy?

The characteristics of such favoured "safe harbour" investment vehicles should be: a really long-term goal, a high capital investment (nine to eleven digits) required to get the ball rolling, and some way of providing them with an assurance that expropriation at pitch-fork point is averted by the very nature of the investment. Oh, and it should eventually flip over into delivering economic GDP growth beneficial to the "little" people—us—without degrading the biosphere that we live in.

I've got two candidates for such investments: (a) commercial thermonuclear fusion reactors, and (b) colonizing Venus.

Fusion: we are not fifty years away any more. We're about thirty years and $100Bn away. Or we're about 8-10 years and $200Bn and a Manhattan Program level of urgency away—it depends on the political and legislative framework. However, building tokamak fusion reactors (like ITER) is never going to be cheap; to get 1Gw of electrical power out implies a 5Gw thermal reactor (and a third of its power is going to go into maintaining the fusion reaction). More realistically, tokamaks will come in 5Gw power output and larger sizes, making them an order of magnitude larger than today's big-ass 1Gw PWR, AGR, and AP1000 reactors. We're looking at startup costs of $25-50Bn per reactor, and a requirement for up to 1000 of the suckers if we want to roll it out globally as a major energy source.

So: it's a project that will plausibly soak up $25-50Tn and take 10-30 years to roll out while needing 30-60 years to break even and start to provide a return on the capital investment. A good way of making the Koch brothers atone for their sins while preserving the illusion of their wealth, right?

Naah, that's small beer.

Let's get really ambitious and propose a scheme that will cost trillions and take centuries. I am referring, of course, to the colonization of Venus. Venus is usually written off as a destination for human space colonization due, I am convinced, to a lack of vision. Everyone focusses on Mars, probably because Mars doesn't have a runaway greenhouse atmosphere with a surface pressure of around 93 bar and a temperature of 480 celsius. (Mars is cold, chilly, and sits in a near-vacuum—0.01 bar.)

However, there is one place on Venus that is actually rather more hospitable to our type of life than almost anywhere else in the solar system: 50-55km up in the troposphere, the pressure drops to between 1.0 and 0.5 that of the Earth's atmosphere at the surface, and the temperature declines to between 30 and 70 celsius. Furthermore, the gas composition is mostly carbon dioxide. CO2 is dense; with a molecular weight of 44 daltons, it's actually denser than breathable air (80/20 nitrogen/oxygen dimers, average molecular weight around 29-30 daltons). A balloon or Zeppelin full of human-breathable air would actually float as well in the troposphere of Venus as a hydrogen balloon does on Earth. "At cloud-top level, Venus is the paradise planet," as Geoffrey Landis puts it. More here, with links to papers in the footnotes: let's just say that my money would be on a million people living in the clouds of Venus being both cheaper and faster to achieve than getting a million people living on or below the surface of Mars. Although neither project is ever going to be cheap, and my money is on either one costing somewhere north of $10Tn just to get rolling.

Of course, there's no guarantee that colonizing Venus would work out. Or even that it might not prove profitable in the long term, resulting in the giant pile o'gold problem returning to haunt another generation. But some of the billionaire elite already seem inclined to boldly blow their fortune where no fortunes have been blown before. As Elon Musk says: "it would be pretty cool to die on Mars, just not on impact."

So. Should we encourage the custodians of the shitpiles of capital that are damaging our global social fabric to atone for their sins by offering them huge long-term investment opportunities in colonizing Venus and rolling out commercial thermonuclear fusion reactors? (Both worthy(ish) projects that demand a fuckton of money and time which, in our current circumstances, the shrunken machinery of government simply can't afford.) Or should we try and take their hoards away via some other means? And if so, what?

I grew up treasuring the days my dad would head out to refill the propane tank for the cumbersome grill we bought him for some birthday or Father's Day long past. The ghastly Wisconsin winters we continuously weathered were met with late-April BBQ celebrations out on the deck in shorts. And while that unsightly grill—complete with its fire-singed hood and well-worn trays—holds a soft spot in my heart, there's no denying that there are better designed options out there. Enter the Grillo Portable by formAxiom.

Grillo was designed with mobility in mind—and certainly won't send you out on any propane tank trips. The grill can be set up with a single handle (much like and umbrella) and doesn't require any extra accessories or "frippery," in the designer's words.

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Gotta love our readership. Following Wednesday's post admiring the design of Lytro's forthcoming Illum camera, Core77 regular Slippyfish pointed out that it was pulled off by product design and development firm Artefact Group, and shortly after that, Artefact themselves dropped us a line to elaborate on the project.

We only had time to get a few questions in, and I usually can't stop myself from asking the most pedestrian one first: So how long did this project take?

"[Lytro had been developing the guts] for several years, [but] the industrial design portion of that enormous effort lasted only a few months from early ideation to the definition of final design intent," says Markus Wierzoch, Artefact's Design Director. "After that we continued to collaborate with Lytro on some of the design, feasibility and manufacturability details up until the early stages of tooling."

The biggest challenge in designing it?

"Since it is at the same time intended to bring computational photography to the experienced and sophisticated photographer," Wierzoch continues, "our biggest challenge was to find the perfect balance between the new and the familiar, in order for Illum to both stand out from the crowd and at the same time be attractive to the very opinionated group of creative pioneers that it is built for."

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We've seen the concept of gizmo-joined furniture plenty of times before, most recently with Henry Wilson's A-Joint. To refresh your memory, the idea is that the end-user takes a bunch of wood of predetermined sizes, and fastens it together using prefabricated connectors, no traditional joinery required.

But it's this slightly different take on the concept that has our attention. Netherlands-based design studio Minale-Maeda has combined the concept of self-joined furniture with 3D printers and downloadable plans for the connectors, calling the resultant line of furniture Keystones, pictured here. By distributing the production of these connecting components, at least theoretically, among the MakerBot-owning households of the end-users, Minale-Maeda may have struck upon something that could challenge even the mighty IKEA.

Actually, strike that: If Ikea's smart, they'll look into this for themselves. The company has already got the inexpensive mass manufacture of panels down to a science; it is arguably the cam-nut-and-hex-key assembly that serves as the largest barrier for mechanically-challenged consumers. If 3D printers were to see mass domestic uptake, it's not difficult to imagine Ikea shipping you a flatpack of panels, for which you would then self-print the connecting components. (An idiot-proof design for assembly would have to be an integral part of this plan, of course.) It's also conceivable that they could refresh furniture lines with a minimum of hassle, as end-users could print connections for new designs that incorporate existing panels—saving themselves, or their local deliverypersons, a trip.

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via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard

Anthony Jones

Another fireball over Russia

Nomad

Home sick

Photo © Jaime Rojo


flikr | lunapark

Brooklyn

flickr | kenstein


flickr | kenstein


flickr | kenstein


flickr | kenstein


flickr | kenstein

Looking through and back

X-Ray specs

Ask someone to think of a 3D-printed object, and chances are they'll picture something hard ... or perhaps rubbery. Thanks to new technology developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh, however, it's now possible to make soft and fuzzy 3D-printed items, using yarn instead of plastic or resin. Among the first items to be created were little felt teddy bears. .. Continue Reading "Felting printer" creates soft 3D-printed teddy bears

Section: Electronics

Tags: 3D Printing, Carnegie Mellon, Disney Research

Related Articles:

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• MakerBot Thing-O-Matic – the DIY 3D printer
• Homemade LEGObot 3D printer does 3D printing on the cheap
• Computer program is able to match rough sketches to real objects

I don’t really care about chandeliers. When I think about them, which isn’t very often, I fondly remember my Nan, lampshade upon her head, swinging from hers while tapping out a tune on champagne glasses with her stilettos. Aside from that, they’ve always seemed a little clunky and old fashioned and expensive. I’m also not sure about their light. But, if I were to have a chandelier, which I’m currently in danger of, I’d probably go for something like this one from Humans Since 1982.

If I could just get a ceiling fan made from trading algorithms, I’d be good to go. Go where? I don’t know. Probably to buy some candy and cigarettes.

 

"Don’t touch this king crab."

"Sure, evolution."

"Seriously, don’t touch it."

"Yeah, okay, fine."

"I mean it this time."

"Yeah, I can see that."

"No, really. Don’t.”

"I think you’ve made your point."

Photo courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, 2013 Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition.

Have you been watching Cosmos? Me neither.

But seriously, folks, it’s mandatory teevee in my home. I’m literally forcing the kids to watch it. Luckily there are no complaints. This is indoctrination at its finest.

John Hallmén is a Swedish photographer who takes those incredible macro photos of insects. I’m sure some folks get grossed out about stuff like this but I find the minutiae and details of nature to be endlessly fascinating. It’s not often that you get to appreciate the subtleties of life like this. Check out below for some of my favorites.

Via: thefoxisblack.com

The post John Hallmén’s Incredible Macro Photos of Insects appeared first on Create Laboratory Limited.

Being a professional designer and CAD engineer is awesome and gives you almost boundless possibilities to unleash your creativity. Basically anyone can get creative and design something in 3D. Today, a lot of 3D design applications like SketchUp are free, easy to use and require no prior experience. Need a success story to be inspired?

Kurt Plagge has been using SketchUp for 4 years. He started out with 3D modeling his kitchen to see how some modifications to the cabinets would look. Lately, for about a year now, Kurt’s been using it to produce models for 3D printing and he came up with the articulated cube.

“My first 3D printed object was a 50mm cube, but one piece. At that time, I didn’t know if I could even produce anything that could be successfully printed. When that one came back just like I had imagined it, I moved on to integrating moving components. This articulated cube is my fourth printed model and it was created to see how much detail and action I could achieve inside that relatively small volume. I was attempting to get the most bang for my sixteen bucks.”

Kurt Plagge

Kurt has spent around 30 hours to design this cube. Thrilled to unbox the 3D printed version that was delivered, he has made several modifications to improve the functionality of the model: Adding silicone o-rings to tighten up the hinges and gluing in thin strips of styrene plastic to fill some of the gaps between parts. These two techniques set up the model to work nice and tight.

Currently Kurt is working on a new variation of 50 mm cubes with moving parts, in which he is trying to reduce the need for post-printing processes to tighten up the moving parts.

Being printed (in polyamide) as one piece, the articulated cube is an amazing example of what anyone with perseverance and a passion for engineering can do with the help of SketchUp and i.materialise.

Has Kurt inspired you to design something creative too? Then do it, 3D print it through us and let us know about it. We’ll be happy to share your idea with our community. Contact us via community@i.materialise.be.

Destroying everything

le Bat

gifpop! is a tool to make custom cards from animated gifs, using the magic of lenticular printing.

We've got very little hard information, but it seems a handful of European and Scandinavian individual bloggers have been seeded with photos of these forthcoming IKEA designs. The Swedish furniture giant will soon be releasing their IKEA PS 2014 collection, a new line designed "for a home in constant motion, always ready for new situations and furniture needs."

The pieces are quirky to be sure. For one there's this peculiar narrow bench, intended to be a used as temporary butt-parking station while you take your shoes on and off, and it takes up a minimum of space:

There's this odd pendant lamp (pictured at top and below) that brings to mind an exploding Death Star:

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