Transportation

Japan­ese cus­tom mak­er M&M fea­tured this sly cus­tom Kawi W650 in July.
(Site in Japanese)

We’ve all seen the futur­is­tic trans­porta­tion in a sci-fi movie that
has pods join­ing up on the free­way to make “trains.” The assump­tion is
that this sort of con­stant­ly recon­fig­ur­ing con­voy would require
mas­sive infra­struc­ture invest­ment and com­plex con­trol­ling software.
Maybe not. Maybe all it takes is an in-car mod­ule and a professional
driver/conductor in the front vehi­cle. Draft­ing that semi may actually
prove to be the answer to the traf­fic mess.

Mas­sive time-waster alert. Track marine traf­fic in real time. Like so
many of the best infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing and report­ing efforts this one
is a vol­un­teer col­lab­o­ra­tion. Using exist­ing tech­nol­o­gy and pip­ing the
data to a cen­tral data gath­er­ing and dis­play app is the way to go for
so many track­ing prob­lems. (Weath­er under­ground is anoth­er brilliant
example.)

The Unitd FWD Time Attack­Un­lim­it­ed Scion tC is arguably the ugli­est
damn race car in the world at the moment. But it’s kin­da fun to cruise
the pic­ture gallery and won­der what we could do with that Datsun
sit­ting out behind Dav­e’s shop. (It would be nice if these guys to
set­tle on the exact name of the car too.)

For those of you fly­ing this hol­i­day sea­son. Try to book something
through SFO. I had for­got­ten about see­ing this exhib­it of space toys
from the past dur­ing a lay­over in Feb. 30 min­utes of pure nostalgic
joy.

—————-

Society

Ars Tech­ni­ca has a decent sum­ma­ry of the Bilis­ki patent case. (Can a
com­mod­i­ty trad­ing method be patent­ed? No, it fails the transformation
test.) The impli­ca­tions for oth­er none tra­di­tion­al (soft­ware) patents
aren’t entire­ly clear yet but the case bears close fol­low­ing by those
of us who make our liv­ing mov­ing bits from one state to anoth­er. The
fact that the case under con­sid­er­a­tion isn’t about a soft­ware patent
trou­bles me, but it looks to be the start­ing point for the judicial
recon­sid­er­a­tion of what a patent is meant to protect.

War­ren Ellis has a bad day and puts an end to the dis­cus­sion of the
aug­ment­ed real­i­ty as the urban dig­i­tal future. One of the finest
snarks ever and he uses the word shou­ti­ness.

I don’t think any of my loy­al read­ers have access to a scanning
elec­tron micro­scope. (I’m prob­a­bly wrong) So if you sim­ply must have
that sam­ple of Bar­bie Hair exam­ined in great detail, pack it up with
the appro­pri­ate form and send it off to ASPEX. The mak­er of SEMs is
run­ning the clever­est publicity/public ser­vice cam­paign ever. You send
it, they scan it and post it on the web­site. There’s a link below the
exam­ple pic­tures on this page to a cou­ple more.

Anoth­er site that focus­es on the very small. Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah’s
Genet­ic Sci­ence Learn­ing Cen­ter has a wid­get that lets you experience
just how small small can be. Move the slid­er to the right and watch
small (coffe bean) get small­er (bak­er’s yeast) and small­er (‘flu
virus) and final­ly small­est (car­bon atom)

———————-

Art, Images

Under­wa­ter pho­tog­ra­phy is cool. Under­wa­ter movie mak­ing is awesome.
Here’s a set of pic­tures tak­en by a diver/photographer of the action
at Pinewood Stu­dio’s under­wa­ter tank.

More about the facil­i­ty on the Pinewood site. Click on the Water
Film­ing link in the left sidebar.

Chanzhi Lee’s Nestcage book is an extreme exam­ple of the
trans­for­ma­tion of text as book into book as object. What­ev­er that
means. The artist’s own web­site is fun but flash based and unlinkable.

On the Span­ish lan­guage blog WIP (work in progress) you can watch the
pro­gres­sion of a page of a com­ic from the rough sketch to the finished
prod­uct. Love it.

more tomor­row my lovelies.

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