Hovertext: In fairness, my entire existence is an affectation.

Project PrintGREEN is turning 3D printers into on-demand gardeners after designing a “green” 3D printer in 2013. The printer produces living prints, printing customized objects in a variety of sizes and forms. The project was created at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, conceived of by students Maja Petek, Tina Zidanšek, Urška Skaza, Danica Rženičnik and Simon Tržan, with help from their mentor Dušan Zidar. The project’s goal is to unite art, technology, and nature, creatively producing living designs with the help of technology.

The “ink” in the machine is a combination of soil, seeds, and water which can be designed to print in any shape or letter. After drying, the muddy mixture holds its form and begins to sprout grass from the organic material. PrintGREEN’s slogan is a twist on the old conservationist motto, “think before you print,” telling their audience to “print, because it is green.” You can follow the project’s progress on their Facebook page here. (via My Modern Met)

all images by PrintGREEN

Book Hive Teaser Trailer from Adam Laity on Vimeo.

Black Cat Films presents a teaser trailer for the new Rusty Squid project, BOOK HIVE- an interactive artwork now showing at Bristol Central Library.

Book Hive is an interactive sculpture created to celebrate the 400 year anniversary of Bristol Libraries, and it will ultimately feature 400 animatronic books. Large wooden structures awash with honey light will engulf visitors in an immersive and atmospheric environment, where life-like animated books, inhabiting the cells will physically engage visitors, reacting to their movements in the space. Book Hive is a three month project, where the public gets the opportunity to influence its development. Rusty Squid will observe the public’s behaviour, and with the assistance of the Book Hive Keepers (exhibition stewards), collect feedback, in order to transform the shape of the hive and the way that the books respond.

Read more

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Luke Jerram makes glass sculptures of various viruses – above is ebola. Check out more on his site here.

Glass Microbiology is a body of glass work which has been developed by artist Luke Jerram since 2004. Made to contemplate the global impact of each disease, the artworks are created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially coloured imagery received through the media. In fact, viruses have no colour as they are smaller than the wavelength of light. By extracting the colour from the imagery and creating jewel-like beautiful sculptures in glass, a complex tension has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent.

Read more.

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

An organization in which Paypal founder Peter Thiel is an investor is aiming to build a floating city-state by 2020. The Seasteading Institute says semi-independent floating cities would provide an opportunity to try out new modes of government and could also tackle a number of other problems.

• Floating
• City
• Future
• Sustainability

• Floating sauna to be launched in Seattle
• Floating bridge installed at Dutch fortress-island
• Abandoned sailboat transformed into floating pizzeria
• Viewpoint floating platform provides peaceful hideaway on London canal
• City Beach NYC aims to bring a portable floating beach to the Hudson River
• Floating Sauna seeks to set sail in Seattle

pattheflip:

I spend more of my time and energy talking about politics to strangers on the Internet than I ever thought I would, and over the last few years of participating in the events and conversations around Occupy, Ferguson, GamerGate, Baltimore, and every other flashpoint in this on-going culture war, I’ve noticed a problem.

Specifically, I’ve noticed a problem with the way the left-to-far-left folks – you know, the vast and contradictory coalition known as “progressives” – engage in political discourse online (and probably in person, too, though I can’t say I’ve noticed this as much). The problem starts, I think, because we often place too much emphasis on highlighting the fucked-up things people say or do, and demand that blood and sanctions be exacted upon the person who fucked up.

This behavior has yielded plenty of thinkpieces coming from across the political spectrum indicting the modern “call-out culture”, which leaves people afraid to make mistakes publicly or say the wrong thing for fear of being pounced on by the people they thought of as allies.

Thing is, I don’t think the problem is actually the call-out itself; I think that is a powerful tool in identifying our own problematic behaviors and becoming better people.

I think that the problem isn’t calling people’s behavior out so much as the lack of intellectual humility that I have been seeing in the execution of the public call-out. I feel like many times I see someone tweet about A Horrible Thing Someone Said with a slight sense of glee lying beneath a pious veneer.

I see people accumulating political capital – typically by accumulating masses of followers and influential retweeters to build their capacity to influence online discourse – by drawing attention to shitty things that people do and say. They’re consciously performing as a Good Person On The Internet, and people follow them so that they can also feel like Good People On The Internet.

That makes me feel super weird and uncomfortable for all kinds of reasons. We end up seeing Good People On The Internet disagree, and the conversations end up polarizing between two camps united behind personalities, not critical analysis. People aren’t arguing about whether X message or Y action was racist or sexist, they’re arguing about whether they think Person A is a better human being than Person B.

It’s demagoguery, not critical thinking, and it leads us to start reducing political ideologies down to factions and figureheads. What’s worse, we often end up reproducing the same damn privilege structures we’re fighting against in our own movements, as the influence and political capital ends up going to privileged allies who get to feel like they’re The Good People. (Just think about how much attention and fawning white dudes get for tweeting about social justice-y stuff.)

Hopefully if you’ve read this far, you should start feeling a little bit prickly. You’ve probably engaged in some of the same public performance of Good Personhood, or blindly retweeted an opinion by a known Good Guy just so you can make sure everyone knows you’re On The Level, or something like that. Good! That’s exactly how you should be feeling.

Learning to be good people

I originally titled this essay “The New Progressive Religion” because, from my outsider’s perspective of religion I see some parallels that might better help explain the issues I’m talking about.

I grew up in the Bay Area – born in San Francisco, moved to Oakland when I was about 14. I wasn’t brought up to be very religious, though my family on both sides were Catholic. I never quite understood what grown people got out of practicing religion as a kid, but as an adult, though, I think I get it: I want to be with people who have similar ideas about what it means to be a good person (and to be good people to each other) as I do, so if I can find an ideology that accurately captures this, all I need to do is find people who share that ideology and I’m set.

Both religion and politics are trying to answer an old question – “How can we be good people to each other?” – typically by laying out a system of ethics and then prescribing behaviors and rules based on those ethics. Organized religion tries to answer this question with texts that we use to parse a divine being’s will; intersectional feminism tries to answer the question by analyzing how our individual relationships to other people are mediated by power we wield over each other but don’t fully understand.

Now, when you start incorporating ideological teachings into the way you live your life, there isn’t really a lossless copying method. There is no perfect follower of Christ, just as there is no perfect feminist; practicing either is a constant process of study to figure out how to interpret ideology into action, and then learning from the results of the action to better clarify or refine the source ideology.

So, with religious folks, you get some people who put a whole lot of work in studying and analyzing, and you get some people who go to Church once a week and listen to the teachings because that’s what everyone in your city does. In my experience, the people who put more work into studying their religion are the ones that tend to be the most accepting and open-minded and are pretty good at Being Good People, while the people who treat the learning process as one-way end up holding a set of rules as sacred even when doing so seems contrary to the end goal of Being Good People.

This is what I’ve been seeing in progressive spaces: There are people who study and critically interrogate their practice of their ideologies, and there are people who treat Progressive Social Justice Politics Stuff as a dogmatic set of behaviors and attitudes and use their adherence to and others’ deviance from to define themselves as Good People.

Which is ridiculous, because the experiences and ideologies at the core of that Progressive Social Justice Politics Stuff are constantly being challenged, iterated on, and added to, so the idea that anyone could be dogmatic about it seems kind of bizarre.

The need for intellectual humility

I never felt a strong need for religion in my life. I think this is because when I was in college, I started being actively involved in my campus Asian American community, working in both social and political organizations, and cultivating my knowledge of intersectional feminism through study and practice. It was kind of funny, actually – I majored in Philosophy and generally felt like all the ethics stuff we studied was more of a logician’s circlejerk, while the electives I took in the Asian American Studies department were directly relevant to giving me the tools I needed to start trying to make sense of the world and How To Be A Good Person.

One of the side effects of studying this kind of thing in school is that our professors did a great job impressing upon us that this field of knowledge is incomplete. The words and theoretical frameworks they gave us so that we could begin to describe the experiences we shared but couldn’t name were still works in progress. The academic roots of ethnic studies, like any other political theory or philosophy work, came from intelligent people finding ways to understand the people around them. We were just testing the waters. We read selections of the core texts, but never the full texts, or perhaps never all the texts. Not that you need to find this in school, mind you – but for a guy like me who is prone to thinking he is smarter than he actually is, it sure fucking helped.

This inculcated in us a certain kind of ideological humility. When you see thinkpieces explaining why X action is actually kind of racist, the part that explains why it’s racist isn’t handed down from a monk on a mountain; it’s the intellectual outcome of applying a theory of power that helps us understand how we can unintentionally hurt or suppress each other. This theory is constantly being challenged, iterated, and refined as people continue to build this body of knowledge based on contributing their experiences and understandings to the pile. Being Good is not a solved problem.

So we continue to study, and we continue to practice our politics expecting these theories to change – expecting someone smarter than us to come by and explain to us that we’re wrong, that we missed something.

And when it comes to applying the knowledge we have of How To Be Good People to criticize each others’ behavior, we should strive to do so knowing that our understanding is imperfect and we are seeking to improve upon it, not to draw battle lines between mini-celebrities or jockey for social and political position.

Here’s the thing, though: I arrived at my current political beliefs by taking a bunch of really great college classes with a bunch of really great (and endlessly patient) professors, and then taking than knowledge and working through it in daily life with my friends, family, and loved ones. It’s a painful process, and near as I can tell, it never stops.

And when I see people tweeting up a storm about some fucked up shit, it sometimes comes off as though that speech isn’t coming from an ideological base that is carefully cultivated, but from a set of internalized rules. Kind of like the guy in your local health and fitness forum who spouts off all the “right” advice for lifting and dietary regime but couldn’t actually tell you how it works (and where it might not).

People go to school specifically to study this kind of thing!

People who haven’t even been born yet are going to go to school for this shit, and write some amazing books that will make everything we know about being Good People look as hopelessly barbaric as slavery does now!

Some people don’t really have to go to school for this shit because they live it every day!

We’re all complicit in interlocking systems of oppression that ruthlessly fuck over our fellow human beings and we’ll probably never in our lifetime manage to be even net-neutral in terms of our impact on other people!

Forget being a Good Person – the best we can hope for is probably “Less Shitty People Than Everyone Around Us”!

None of the above factors should stop anyone’s desire to be a Good Person in the slightest – but it should put our own efforts to do work on ourselves in perspective, I think. Especially when we choose to take on the responsibility of pointing out how someone else could be a Good Person.

Asking people to change their lives super hard and we should treat it as such

I think that one of the hardest things to do as a person is tell someone that you know how to live their life better than they do. It’s a pretty bold assertion, and we shouldn’t do it lightly! But it’s kind of what we’re doing in a call-out.

When we call out shitty behavior, we are trying to communicate that a certain action caused injury: Hey, you said this thing and it was pretty hurtful for Reasons, and if you are trying to be a Good Person, I think it would be a good idea to make amends and not do this thing again.

But it’s very easy for that call-out to become something sinister: Hey, you said this thing and it was pretty hurtful for Reasons, and I want people to know that I am a Good Person and you are a Not Good Person.

One comes from a place of desire for mutual improvement; the other comes from a desire for personal validation at another’s expense. One is productive; the other is not.

What’s more, I don’t actually think it’s easy to tell in the moment how much of a call-out is motivated by selfish vs. selfless reasons. These are a few questions that I often ask myself, though, and they might help you as well:

• Are you publicly broadcasting your call-out because you want the attention, or because you feel like your call-out’s success depends on others’ signal boosting?
  
• Are you privately communicating your call-out because you think it’ll be more helpful for the recipient, or because you want them to save face?
  
• Are you using your voice instead of amplifying others’ because you want the spotlight, or because you want to put yourself on the line as a visible supporter?
  
• Are you signal boosting someone else because you want to amplify marginalized voices, or because you don’t want to stick your own neck out?
  
• Are you being witty because you want your hot take to be the one that wins Twitter, or because you feel like your wit serves to better illustrate the damage done?
  
• Are you as vocal in sharing the good as you are in calling attention to the bad?
  
• Are you holding strangers on the Internet to higher standards of behavior as you do your friends?
  

If you have your own suggestions on ways to keep yourself honest, I’d sure as hell love to hear ‘em.

Be excellent to each other

I know there are some people reading this thinking, “Patrick, you jerk, you just wrote this thing so people will think you’re a Good Person. You’re performing Good Person just like everyone else.”

I can see why you would think that way! I used to be much more invested in the idea of appearing like a Good Person than actually behaving as such; it’s a thing I am still working on.

Believe me: I don’t like getting in Twitter fights with people because I think it’s super hard to actually change people’s opinions most of the time, and so it just becomes mutual public grandstanding in order to appeal to and broaden your follower base. I don’t think my opinions are anything special, and I wish people would pay attention to me for the neat stuff I would like to someday make or the stupid jokes I write on Twitter, not this post. And when I do call something out, I have a sinking feeling of dread in my stomach as it starts to spread around the Internet, because I know that there are lots of people out there smarter than I am about this stuff. If you see me grandstanding, tell me.

Let’s stay humble, be excellent to each other, and…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0uVwVUVsbY

…you know the rest.

–patrick miller

Google patents creepy internet high-tech toys

Technology inspire movies movies inspire new technologies. Latest example: Google patents Battlestar Galacticas Muffit / the super teddy from Spielberg’s AI.

A doll that could turn its head towards users and listen to what they were saying, before sending commands to remote computer servers. Nuff said.

Yep. Toys with microphones, speakers, cameras and motors as well as a wireless connection to the internet (can’t wait for toy data plans) and remote speech & visual recognition services. Future. From BBC:

The firm has published a patent that describes devices that would turn their heads towards users and listen to what they were saying, before sending commands to remote computer servers. The three-year old patent was spotted recently by the legal technology firm SmartUp. It described the proposal as “one of Google’s creepiest patents yet”.

Privacy campaigners have also raised concerns. A spokeswoman for Google was unable to say whether this was a product the firm might develop and sell.

Yay. Cute high-tech anthropomorphic bunny rabbits, dragons and barbies. Privacy campaigners have also raised concerns. Of course.

[read more at BBC] [patent] [via nerdcore]

Hanna & Becca

By Giuliano Brocani

Robotica - A Bionic Approach to Prosthetics Controlled by Thought

A month ago I shared the first episode of Robotica by The New York Times. Robotica is a series that investigates the intersection of robotics, business and society.

Episode 3 features a next-generation prosthetic arm from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (which has 26 joints, can curl up to 45 pounds and is controlled with a person’s mind) and Les Baugh, who became the first bilateral shoulder-level amputee to wear and simultaneously control two of the Laboratory’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs.

It’s the most impressive thing you’ll see today.

[read more]

vorked:

rustypolished:

Tom and his stunt double BTS. 

Mad Max and his brother, Angry Andy.

el-sol:

Untitled-103 

Citylights by iancjw

boredpanda:

Cats In Kimonos Are A Thing In Japan

"You have a giant robot, we have a giant robot – we have a duty to the science fiction lovers of this world to fight them to the death." America laid down the challenge; Japan has accepted. In one year's time, the two countries will face off on neutral soil for the world's first international giant robot dual. Two 15-foot-tall steel gundam suits with one or two pilots inside, facing each other in battle. There will be guns, there will be giant swinging steel fists, and the fight won't be over until one has pounded the other into scrap. Can you hear that sound? It's the gentle foaming of a million anime fans.

• Combat
• gundam
• Robots

• Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot to ferry wounded to safety
• Hyundai develops small welding robot to tackle big jobs
• Mini humanoid robots are beginning to walk more like people
• Video: Unified Weapons Master (UWM) explained
• Unified Weapons Master: Bloodless, high tech, full contact weapons fighting to debut in 2016
• Instant fortresses modified for instant demolition

There must be something in the water supply around Toyota HQ. Maybe pure grain alcohol. As if a Lexus hoverboard wasn't enough weirdness for one week, Toyota also revealed the Ultimate Utility Vehicle, a Sienna/Tacoma hybrid that will be trekking across North America. The Swagger Wagon has more swagger than ever, along with the newfound mettle to back it up.

• Tacoma
• Off-road
• Toyota
• Van

• Toyota 4Runner, one of the last real SUVs, gets redesigned
• Lexus positions RC F coupe as halo model for F performance brand
• Amphicruiser: Amphibious 4WD based on Toyota Land Cruiser
• Wolf in sheep's clothing: Toyota packs 850-hp drag inside a Camry
• Lexus has developed a hoverboard ... seriously
• Toyota i-Road electric three-wheeler gets green light for early production

A new software being developed at MIT is proving able to autonomously repair software bugs by borrowing from other programs and across different programming languages, without requiring access to the source code. This could save developers thousands of hours of programming time and lead to much more stable software.

• Software
• Artificial Intelligence
• MIT

• Creative AI: Software writing software and the broader challenges of computational creativity
• Near perfect poker playing software will clean you out
• Cornell software identifies bird species from users' photos
• Harvard scientists develop a transistor that learns
• Pepper the robot recognizes your emotions and shows its own
• Artificial intelligence program that learns like a child

I'm going to try something new with this particular project. Instead of dividing up the work across multiple blog posts, I'm going to put everything in this single post, but update it as I progress. So if you want to follow along, bookmark this page and check back regularly.

This year at San Diego Comic Con, WB/DC had a TON of great costumes on display in their pavilion, from both movies and television. It was actually quite stunning to be able to see so many iconic and awesome costumes up close. Downside is they were all behind plexiglass, which made photography problematic.

A couple of things that really caught my eye were the Wonder Woman shield and sword. With such amazing reference material available, and my little brain already at work figuring out how I can replicate these, I finally got to work.

Here's a picture of the shield. If I had to lay odds, I would say that this particular one was not screen used, but is instead part of a "Touring Suit." For all intents and purposes, it's identical to the ones used in the movie, this one just wasn't used in the movie. this is all conjecture, mind you, but it fits with the facts I have available to me.

My initial impression of the shield is that it's not terribly complicated. It has a great paint job on it, and the only thing that really struck me as challenging is the lettering that encircles the thing. The shield has a number of layers on it, which immediately struck me as something I could vac form over a buck, and then just cut it up to replicate the different steps.

Which means that the first order of business is to fabricate a buck that will be used in vac forming. My approach to building this buck is to create a skeleton out of MDF, fill the voids with foam, then shape it to where it needs to be. Let's begin!

We start with a blank canvas. Well, more precisely, a couple pieces of 1/4" MDF. Available at Home Depot.

I had originally considered the idea of getting the skeleton pieces laser cut, as it would be faster and more precise, but ultimately the logistics and cost proved to outweigh the convenience of simply making it out of MDF. Though I will lose a degree of precision, as regular readers of this blog will know I am constantly struggling to LOSE my crippling inclination towards perfection, and I think chosing MDF is a good step in the right direction. Remember, better to have a finished piece that isn't perfect, than a perfect piece that isn't finished!

I start by creating a simple jig out of styrene which will allow me to draw a circle. Since I know what the diameter of my shield needs to be, I take half that distance, and poke two holes in styrene at that distance. One hole will be used to nail the styrene to the MDF, and the other will be used for the pen. The hole created by the nail serves the dual function of also providing me with a center point of the circle. That will come in handy later.

And here are the results of my high tech circle drawing solution. I'm using a fine point sharpie to mark the MDF. It's more resilient than pencil, but it's also more broad and noticeable than a regular pen.

I used my circular saw to cut the MDF piece in half, just to make it more manageable.

And then I cut it down even further, thus making room for my coping saw to do all of the heavy lifting. I wasn't going for precision here at all, just trying to trim off the fat to make the next step easier.

If I had a band saw or a jig saw, I would have used it at this step to do the fine trimming on the circle. But I don't. I actually prefer to do this stuff by hand as it allows me greater control, and if I screw up, I can stop quickly and back up. Notice that at this point I was not going for precision. Just trying to get it within an 1/8" or less. Or so.

In case you didn't know what a coping saw is, that's one sitting on top of the circle I just cut out.

For the very fine tuning of all the shapes I'm cutting out of MDF, my plan is to use my table top disk sander. I can get VERY precise with it. First step is to calibrate the table to make sure it's at a right angle with the disk. I did this using a right angle bracket that I typically use for machining. This one is a little rusty. Remind me to clean it up sometime.

And here are the final results, after carefully running the edge of the circle through the sander. I am extremely happy with how this turned out. Looks really great. Now granted, I could have had a circle laser cut to precision... but where's the fun in that?

See how close it is to the pen? Nice!

Next up is to draw reference lines on the disk. This will help me place the ribs/slats down. I start by using a right angle ruler and just drawing straight through that centerpoint that I created earlier with the nail. Handy, right?

Then it's just a matter of using the ruler, a 45 degree square, and a compass to map out the rest of the lines. I'm dividing up the buck similarly to how it's done on the final product. Might be overkill, but the more ribs I have on the skeleton, the more uniform my final shape will be.

Now I'm going to start creating the ribs. A couple things are very important here. One is that the bottom edge of each slat be perfectly straight. This will serve to eliminate any warp in the disk, and I can tell you right now there is a little bit. When the MDF stock sits on the shelf at Home Depot for a few months, it tends to warp and bend a little under its own weight. No big deal. I also need to make sure it's the right width. The outer tips of each rib have to precisely touch the outer rim of the circle. Or as close as I can get it.

The next step is absolutely critical, as it will define the entire shape of the shield. I used a picture of the real shield for reference, and did my best to estimate the shape of the curve. It's a pretty shallow curve, by my estimations. Even if this is off, I'm not too worried about it. If better reference becomes available, I can always just start again. Wah wah.

What I'm going to do is create a styrene template that represents one half of the curve of the shield. I'm doing only one half so that I can duplicate it across a slat to get the entire shape. This will allow me to ensure that it is symmetrical. Which is also pretty important in a project like this.

I cut out a rough shape in styrene, and then fine tuned it with a sanding block. Once I was happy with the final shape, I marked off a point on the styrene that was the length of the radius of the disk. Here's what the final template looks like.

I start by laying the styrene onto the MDF strip. I once again put my angle to use to make sure that the lower lip of the template is butted squarely up against the lower lip of the MDF. I need this placement to be consistent across all of the slats, or else ... bad things. Like crossing the streams and all that. Dogs and cats living together. You know the routine.

With the center point marked, and my knowledge of how wide the slats need to be, it's then a simple matter of just flipping the styrene template over and marking the other half of the MDF slat.

It's pretty much magic.

Here is the slat all drawn out on the MDF. I'm now going to follow the exact same procedure I used on cutting the circle. Start with a coping saw, then take it to the bench grinder for fine tuning.

Here's the first slat all trimmed and ready to go.

Test fitting! AND it's perfect! The edges line up really nicely, and the center point matches. I'm really happy with how things are shaping up at this point.

I cut the second one, and cut opposite teeth in both slats so that they would fit together. The idea is that these really serve as anchors for the rest of the pieces.

I'm using regular old wood glue to attach the slats to the disk. It's like building a TARDIS all over again!

I glued the two slats down and clamped the edges into place. This effectively got rid of any and all warping of the disk along the two main axis. Good stuff! Looking great so far!

Fast forward, all the slats are now in place. Aside from those first two ones, the rest were all half slats.

After the glue had a chance to dry, this is how it turned out. I'm EXTREMELY happy with the results. Looking GOOD!

Now it's time to fill in all the gaps in between the ribs. My original plan was to use pink insulation foam, mainly because I had some on hand. The plan is to cut it into wedges, then glue them in place. Because the shield is taller than 1", I'll need to do two layers.

Using the same jig I created for drawing the circle on the MDF, I draw a circle on the pink foam. It's going to be a little too big, but who cares. I'll just trim it.

Just like with the MDF, I then use rulers and stuff to map out all the pie wedges.

For cutting the foam, I'm using one of those long bladed box knives. I keep a sharpener handy to make sure the cuts are as clean as can be. Spoiler alert: it was not sharp enough and some of the cuts are kinda chunky. It really doesn't matter though, as this foam will be buried deep within the shield.

Here's the foam all cut into wedges. Yay!

The final item I completed in this, my first day of building, was to glue the foam wedges into place. Honestly, I don't even know if the wood glue will hold, but time will tell. The good news is that I don't need much tenacity, as it only needs to hold the foam in place until I vac form the thing.

That brings to a close this first entry on the build. Everything you see here was completed in one day. In hindsight, it really doesn't seem like that much was accomplished, but much of the work was very repetitive and precise, which is really what took so much time. Stay tuned!

July 29, 2015 Update

Much has been accomplished in an afternoon of work, though some mistakes were make. As with almost every project, new things are tried, and new lessons are learned. New skills established and all that. This project is no exception.

The first thing I did was trim away a bit of the pink foam. I used my coping saw and that big old blade I showed a picture of earlier.

And let me stop right here to say THIS is the point where things go sideways. My original plan was to cut more pink foam, glue it into place, and then shave it down to shape. Just like I did the first layer. But for some reason, I wanted to try something new. A friend of mine from Germany, Svetlana Quindt AKA Kaumi Cosplay, has done some truly amazing things with expanding spray foam. I watched one of her entertaining and enlightening tutorial videos a while back, and thought I would give it a try.

Please check out Svetlana's website at https://www.kamuicosplay.com/ and do yourself a favor and purchase one of her e-books. Amazingly well written and insightful. You'll be making armor like a pro in no time!

Honestly I think my big mistake here was not letting the stuff cure overnight. Or maybe I got the wrong brand. Or maybe something else. Still, live and learn.

Here's the stuff I picked up from Home Depot. Seems simple enough.

Here is the stuff right after it has been applied to the shield. Yes, it expands a lot. More than I anticipated, but that doesn't really matter.

Then I left the workshop to go see "Ant-Man," which I really enjoyed. When I came back to the workshop, the foam looked like this.

It was, for the most part, rigid. But it still had some give to it. That should have been my first indicator.

I once again employed my coping saw and a long blade to cut the expanding foam to shape. It actually looked pretty good.

I think used my orbital sander and a sanding block to get things closer to the shape I wanted them to be.

The bummer about foam is that fiberglass resin doesn't like it. Actually, I should be more clear. Some foams don't like some resins. I'll leave it at that, and leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which foams don't like which resins. In general, the polyester resins that you will find at your local auto parts store or Home Depot are going to be caustic and corrosive to these types of foams. It'll be a total disaster.

With that in mind, a common technique employed by foam builders, and folks who work with pink foam, is to coat the foam with a layer of white glue, or in this case "Mod Podge" to create a barrier between the resin and the foam. The glue does not react with the resin in a bad way, and therefore blocks the resin from wrecking the foam. That all sounds great.

A couple bummers to note at this point. There were GIANT bubbles/holes in the expanding foam I used. I don't know if I did it wrong, or if that's just how this particular brand of foam works. Also notice that by this time, the foam was contracting a lot. A. LOT. And that didn't make me happy.

However, I proceeded with my plan to apply a coat of Mod Podge to the foam, which overall went just fine.

At this point I was kind of thrown off my game, and it went downhill fast from here. I then brushed on a couple of coats of West Systems EPOXY resin. In hindsight, I don't think the epoxy resin would have damaged the foam. I could have saved the Mod Podge step.

I was going to throw some matting onto the shield to help build it up, but because the Mod Podge had not yet completely dried, I just kind of danced around the still-wet parts and did what I could.

And that's where it stands after session number two in the workshop. I have the pink foam shaped pretty well, and swiss cheese expanding foam collapsing by the minute.

July 31, 2015 Update

Today was a productive day, though tiring. In between giving a lot of my attention to some new breakthroughs on my Superman Returns Cape project (YES, that project is STILL going!!!) and cleaning up the shop, the work on the shield really fell into the tired old loop of putty/sand/primer/repeat, which regular readers of this blog will know what a huge fan of that process I am.

I ended up brushing on a couple of coats of Smooth-On 300, which is great because it cures quickly. I figured using the West Systems stuff was just going to delay the project, as it takes about 24 hours to fully cure. The 300 is ready to be sanded in 15 mins, and it can be used to build up recesses quickly.

I also used some Evercoat kitty hair to fill some of the bigger voids, many of which were created when I carved out chunks of the orange expanding foam which really never got fully rigid. That's another bummer that resulted from using that spray foam instead of just cutting up more pieces of pink foam.

A couple coats of Rustoleum automotive primer later, along with a few applications of Bondo spot putty, and things are starting to look good. In general, I do not like Rustoleum primers, but for this project I found it suitable because first of all, they have it at home depot and it's fairly cheap, second it's a pretty heavy build primer, and third MDF tends to soak it up so it's great for filling it in. Same thing with bondo spot putty. Not the best putty and I would not recommend it for a finished prop, but for something like this which is going to be used as a buck, I like it because it's cheap, readily available, and also sands very easily. Using something like full blown Bondo or an Evercoat product would be overkill because it's expensive, and it's also much harder to sand.

Lastly, I put together a quick video showing what the shield looks like after this third day of work. Check it out if you are interested!

August 6, 2015 Update

I can now say with complete certainty that it was a flat out, full on mistake to use that spray on foam stuff. While it may have valuable applications on a variety of projects, this is not one of them.

The bottom line is that the foam never truly gets rigid, nor does it keep its shape. It seems to expand and contract based on temperature, which is a real bummer.

My attempts to get the surface of the shield smooth and uniform were constantly thwarted by the changing landscape of the shield, caused by the foam. After two days of wrestling with it and trying to compensate for the expansions or shrinkages, I have given up. That is to say, I'm just going to consider this "good enough" and fix any imperfections in the styrene pull that comes out of the vac form machine.

THAT said, I think it's really looking good so far, and I think whatever is produced by the vac machine will be a great starting point for the rest of the project.

August 24, 2015 Update

I have started building a vac form table to help out with this project. I made a separate blog entry for it, so as to not entirely clutter up this post. Check it out right here!!!

If a NASA experimental program pans out, the first aircraft on Mars could be a flying wing. Under development at NASA Armstrong, the Prandtl–m is a flying wing glider designed to fly piggyback with a future Mars rover mission to provide low-altitude reconnaissance. It's scheduled to begin test flights later this year.

• Mars
• NASA
• Aircraft

• Version 3.0 of Aeromobil flying car unveiled
• Could this 18-motor wing be the future of electric aircraft?
• Real-time sonic boom display moves closer to cockpit integration
• Ten-motor electric plane takes off
• Bio-Electric-Hybrid-Aircraft concept aims to quietly rule the skies
• AirStrato drones give military performance at "affordable" prices

chekhovandowl:

sparkafterdark:

osamusato:

gifsboom:

Weed Whacker vs Scythe. [video]

grasscon

What a farce. Not only is the contest weighted towards the scythe because Weed Whackers are meant for edging and trimming of WEEDS in hard to reach places, not thick grass, but the scythe cut that patch super uneven and it looks like absolute shit. The WeedWhacker took slightly longer but did a much neater, better job with less effort. 

Really thought he comparison is absurd, Nobody would ever use a WeedWhacker to replace a scythe, they do completely different things, just like you’d never use a scythe to cut down weeds growing out of a sidewalk. If it’s for trimming a lawn it should be against a lawnmower, which would fucking destroy it, and if it’s for harvesting hay it should be against a combine harvester, which would destroy it exponentially more.

This is nothing more than lies and propaganda from butthurt scythelovers and I for one will not stand for it.

unrest in the grass fandom

Bronze Age gold spirals found in Boeslund, 900-700 BC. Credit: Morten Petersen / Zealand Museum.

A team of archaeologists working in Boeslunde, Denmark recently stumbled onto an intriguing mystery: nearly 2,000 tightly-wound golden spirals dating back to the Bronze Age. The discovery of gold in Boeslunde isn’t uncommon, as numerous gold objects have been unearthed in the region over the last few years. But the purpose of these coils has stumped archaeologists who refer to the find as the “golden enigma.”

The spirals are made from extremely pure gold that was hammered flat to just 0.1 millimeter thick. Some pieces measure up to 1.18 inches long and all together weigh between 200 to 300 grams (7-10 ounces). Their exact purpose is anyone’s guess, but Flemming Kaul, a curator with the National Museum of Denmark, believes the coils are most likely related to prehistoric Bronze Age people who were known to offer gold to higher powers as part of sun rituals.

“The sun was one of the most sacred symbols in the Bronze Age and gold had a special magic,” Kaul writes. “Maybe the priest-king wore a gold ring on his wrist, and gold spirals on his cloak and his hat, where they during ritual sun ceremonies shone like the sun.” It’s also suggested the gold was simply buried as part of an elaborate sacrifice.

Whatever the use or meaning behind the pieces, it’s an extraordinary and priceless find. The local museum in
Skaelskor already held a temporary viewing before the spirals find a permanent home. You can read more over on the History Blog. (via Neatorama, Gizmodo)

Gold spirals surrounded by flakes of birch pitch. Credit: Flemming Kaul / National Museum of Denmark.

Gold spiral in situ. Credit: Flemming Kaul / National Museum of Denmark.

Credot:Morten Petersen / Museum Vestsjælland.

Rendered in a style mimicking traditional blue willow pattern design, artist Don Moyer illustrated these fun It-Could-Be-Worse Mugs that remind you that no matter how bad your day is, things could be catastrophically worse. How bad? Think zombie poodles, pirates, attacking UFOs, and aggressive pterodactyls swooping from the sky. The mugs are a companion piece to his ongoing series of Calamityware dishware with similar abominations depicted on fine porcelain plates first featured here last year. The set of 4 mugs are currently funding on Kickstarter. (via The Awesomer)

From squid-like submarines to bouncing rovers, NASA is never short of a crazy idea or two, and now the agency is looking to explore the potential of using "windbots" to investigate the skies above Jupiter. The agency has invested US$100,000 of NIAC funds in the project, which could potentially revolutionize how we gain data on some of the most inhospitable planets in our solar system.

• Jupiter
• NIAC
• NASA

• Objective Europa wants to send astronauts on a one-way mission to Jupiter's moons
• Ganymede may be "club sandwich" moon
• ESA selects instruments for JUICE mission to explore Jupiter and its moons
• Flyby puts Juno spacecraft on a course for Jupiter
• Hubble captures rare image of triple Jupiter transit
• Jupiter and the Moon do a close, slow dance for stargazers

The odds of finding a habitable planet outside of our Solar System got a significant boost today, as NASA announced the discovery of the most Earthlike world orbiting the most Sunlike star yet. Named Kepler-425b, the new world located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus was detected by the Kepler space telescope. It has been characterized by the space agency as "Earth's bigger, older cousin."

• Exoplanet
• Kepler Mission
• NASA

• Kepler exoplanet tally passes 1,000
• Astronomers say one in five sun-like stars likely to have habitable planets
• Kepler strikes exoplanet mother lode, 715 new planets discovered
• MIT study on exoplanet orbits may narrow parameters in search for life
• NASA abandons Kepler repairs, looks to the future
• MIT finds exoplanet with an 8.5-hour year