“It was slightly disturbing for not really knowing what the robot was for at the beginning and then going, ‘Oh, OK. That's Phil,’ ” he says.
CEO Phil Libin is also known as the company’s “robotic overlord.” Libin himself isn’t actually a robot, but when he’s out of town, his robot is keeps an eye on things.
lincvolt.com—Neil Young thinks big and although he is not the kinda guy who drives a Prius, he does want to reduce the demand for petro-fuels enough to eliminate the need for war over energy supplies. So in 2007, he assembled a team to modify his 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible to enable it to run on electricity.
“The goal to eliminate roadside refueling. The goal is to build a car that creates its own fuel.”
The goal of the Lincvolt, the world’s first Micro-Turbine powered Bio-Electro-Cruiser, is to inspire a generation by creating a clean automobile propulsion technology that serves the needs of the 21st century and reduces greenhouse gas emissions to a new low while delivering performance that is a reflection of the driver’s spirit. Eventually the Lincvolt will be a fully autonomous self-driving robotic car.
“Lithium is just like oil. We’re gonna run out of lithium. We need electric cars without batteries. We don’t need batteries.”
BTW the Lincvolt will feature the world’s best sounding audio system, PureTone.
Taking full advantage of Cloud based libraries of recordings by your favorite artists, Lincvolt will simply sound like no other car on earth. Lincvolt passengers will enjoy PureTone “Studio Quality Sound,” the actual sound heard by the artists and producers when they created the original recordings, making Lincvolt audio sound superior in quality and digital resolution to any music ever heard in a car.
“Big is not necessarily not green. Big is okay if it’s smart. You gotta be able to move big things easily.”
techcrunch.com—SIM-LEI (“Leading Efficiency In-Wheel motor”) is an electric car developed by a a spin-off startup, SIM Drive Corporation, at Keio University in Tokyo in collaboration with a total of 34 domestic and foreign companies.
The main selling point of the vehicle is that it can drive over 300km (186 miles) at a constant speed of 100km/h (62 miles/hour).
Jean-Yves (Rollerman) Blondeau created a 31 wheel roller suit which turns his body into a rollerblade and allows him to experience the sensation of travel without a motor. Video by Danny Strasser.
Touchscreen tablet used by crew of Discovery in the 1969 film by Kubrik, 2001: A Space Odyssey
National Public Radio—According to the technology, media and telecommunications company IHS iSuppli, global shipments of touch-screen cellphones and tablets have gone from 244 million units to 630 million units in just two years. This year, iPad sales nearly quadrupled compared to 2010.
To many, the tablet computer seems new. But NPR reports that the idea for a flat, personal computer shaped like a book has actually been around for a long time. Just think of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in which space travelers follow news on Earth via a “Newspad” that downloads the world's major electronic papers.
lexus.com—To show the recyclability of the Lexus CT, Toyota challenged four of fashion’s most innovative designers—Eddie Borgo, Alejandro Ingelmo, John Patrick and Moss Lipow—to recycle the Lexus CT Hybrid into a wearable works of art to appear in Vogue.
BBC—India has launched what it says is the world's cheapest touch-screen tablet computer, priced at just $35.
Aimed at students, it supports web browsing and video conferencing, has a three-hour battery life and two USB ports.
Officials hope the computer will give digital access to students in small towns and villages across India, which lags behind its rivals in connectivity.
Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal handed out 500 Aakash (meaning sky) tablets to students who will test them. He said the government planned to buy 100,000 of the tablets. It hopes to distribute 10 million of the devices to students over the next few years.
raspberrypi.org—Lecturing and working in admissions at Cambridge University, Eben Upton noticed a distinct drop in the skills levels of students applying for Computer Science courses.
In the 1990s, most of the kids applying were hobbyist programmers who had learned to program on Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines. By 2000, a typical applicant had experience only with web design, and sometimes not even with that. These young people grew up in homes with PCs and game consoles and were forbidden by their parents to experiment and program with their relatively expensive home computers.
Eben and his team of colleagues decided to build a computer that would be easily affordable by students—one that they could program and experiment on without ‘breaking.’ Students could tinker with the operating system without worrying about voiding the manufacturer’s warranty and if something goes wrong, they could just reinstall the operating system.
By 2008, processors designed for mobile devices were becoming more affordable, and powerful enough to provide excellent multimedia (a Raspberry Pi can play Blu-Ray-quality video), a feature that makes the board desirable to kids who aren’t initially interested in a raw programming device.
Their $25 Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer that runs on open source software and has outlets for:
Video, HDMI and audio
a USB port
an ethernet port to access the internet
a SD memory card
Because the base is open-source, students can change the code in infinite ways and design their own apps. They can plug the device into a TV, smartphone, or tablet and start hacking.
The Raspberry Pi does not come with a monitor, keyboard or mouse but these devices are available used for very little investment and sometimes for free when a friend or family member upgrades.
Kurt Andersen’s Human Intelligence is a short story about melting ice caps, extraterrestrial spies and the origins of St Nicholas. Directed & produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
CBS News—Across America, recession-fueled foreclosures and plummeting home values have left countless properties abandoned and vulnerable to looting. The problem has gotten so bad in Cleveland, Ohio, that county officials have demolished more than 1,000 homes this year—and plan to demolish 20,000 more—rather than let the blight spread and render nearby homes worthless.
The New Yorker—We normally say that a company “went bankrupt,” implying that it had no choice. But when, recently, American Airlines filed for bankruptcy, it did so deliberately. The airline had four billion dollars in the bank and could have kept paying its bills. But it has been losing money for a while, and its board decided that it was foolish to keep throwing good money after bad. Declaring bankruptcy will trim American’s debt load and allow it to break its union contracts, so that it can slim down and cut costs.
American wasn’t stigmatized for the move. Instead, analysts hailed it as “very smart.” It is now generally accepted that when it’s economically irrational for a company to keep paying its debts it will try to renegotiate them or, failing that, default. For creditors, that’s just the price of business. But when it comes to another set of borrowers the norms are very different. The bursting of the housing bubble has left millions of homeowners across the country owing more than their homes are worth. In some areas, well over half of mortgages are underwater, many so deeply that people owe forty or fifty per cent more than the value of their homes. In other words, a good percentage of Americans are in much the same position as American Airlines: they can still pay their debts, but doing so is like setting a pile of money on fire every month.
These people have no hope of ever making a return on their investment in their homes. So for many of them the rational solution would be a “strategic default”—walking away from the mortgage and letting the bank take the house. Yet the vast majority of underwater borrowers keep faithfully paying their mortgages; studies suggest that perhaps only a quarter of all foreclosures are strategic. Given how much housing prices have fallen, the question is why more people aren’t just walking away. Continue reading at the The New Yorker.
Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, uses Wolfram|Alpha to answer all sorts of questions but you can access Wolfram|Alpha yourself to answer questions, do math, instantly get facts, create plots, calculators, unit conversions, scientific data and statistics, help with homework—and much more.
Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal: to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.
Michael Pollan’s Food Rules began with his hunch that the wisdom of our grandparents might have more helpful things to say about how to eat well than the recommendations of science or industry or government.
KQED—The Art of Doing It Yourself reveals the Bay Area as a haven for artists who are quirky, rebellious, and visionary and tells the story of an eclectic band of do-it-yourself artists mobilizing to help one of their own, “Chicken” John Rinaldi whose warehouse, a combination artist hostel, performance space and community center, is imperiled.
PBS Arts—In an ocean of products, there is someone (hopefully) thinking about the way we experience it. We explore three aspects of product design: build quality and engineering fundamentals, humanism and sustainability, and speculation on the future of the product experience.
In discussion with the 4th generation owner of a classic brand, a brilliant designer of socially progressive products, and an MIT researcher looking to revolutionize the product experience through 3D printing, we’ll capture a sense of the values and challenges in the contemporary world of product design.
Christmas came early for Swiss business man Ueli Anliker who transformed his Mercedes McLaren SLR from a $470,000 sports car to an $11 million extravaganza with a top speed of 210 mph. The car features twenty-five layers of red paint containing 5kg of gold dust. Wheels, headlights and door sills are all covered in 24 carat gold. The interior is jeweled and gold trimmed.
Tom Wrigglesworth and Mathieu Cuvelier created this short film called La Mer de Pianos about Marc Manceaux and his shop Fournitures Generales Pour le Piano, the oldest piano in Paris.
National Public Radio—Filmmaker Hooman Khalili is looking to catch the Academy’s eye and be considered for an Oscar with his film Olive which stars two time Academy Award nominated actress Gena Rowlands (The Notebook, A Woman Under the Influence) and features sound design by Skywalker Sound.
FORBES—Bill Gates revealed that his nuclear power startup, Terrapower, is in talks with the Chinese government to build its next-generation reactors, which can run on waste uranium for centuries without refueling.
“The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste,” Gates said during a talk at China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, according to the Wall Street Journal.
After an initial start-up with a small amount of low-enriched material, this innovative reactor design can run for decades on depleted uranium—currently a waste byproduct of the enrichment process. An established fleet of TWRs could operate without enrichment or reprocessing for millennia.
Huge amounts of depleted uranium, useless to today’s reactors, already exist in stockpiles around the world. Stocks of this material grow as uranium is enriched for the refueling of conventional reactors. The TWR directly converts depleted uranium to usable fuel as it operates. As a result, this inexpensive but energy-rich fuel source could provide a global electricity supply that is, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible.
There are currently 700,000 metric tons of this low-level nuclear leftover product in the United States. Using a TWR, an 8-metric-ton canister of depleted uranium could generate 25 million megawatt-hours of electricity—enough to power 2.5 million U.S. households for one year.
Tim Kemple of Camp 4 Collective shot this music video of Gillian Chase entirely on an iPhone 4S including time lapses which were done with the TimeLapse app.
Michael Koerbel and Anna Elizabeth James of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and co-founders of Majek Pictures, shot and edited a short HD video, Apple of My Eye, entirely on the iPhone 4.
Inspired by the success of Apple of My Eye, the team followed-up with an action spy thriller called Goldilocks shot on iPhone and iPod Touch.
For this TV pilot in serial format, they ramped-up their production with the OWLE mount which allowed them to attached lenses to the iPhone and they edited in Final Cut Pro.
WikiLeaks—Mass interception of entire populations is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries.
It sounds like something out of Hollywood, but as of today, mass interception systems, built by Western intelligence contractors, including for ’political opponents’ are a reality. Today the WikiLeaks Spy Files project began releasing a database of hundreds of documents from as many as 160 intelligence contractors in the mass surveillance industry. WikiLeaks has released 287 documents today, but the Spy Files project is ongoing and further information will be released this week and into next year.
International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world. This industry is, in practice, unregulated. Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers. Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.
Intelligence companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the location of every mobile phone in a city, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligence market.
Across the world, mass surveillance contractors are helping intelligence agencies spy on individuals and ‘communities of interest’ on an industrial scale.
The Wikileaks Spy Files reveal the details of which companies are making billions selling sophisticated tracking tools to government buyers, flouting export rules, and turning a blind eye to dictatorial regimes that abuse human rights.
“The idea is that our society itself is plastic and that in a truly free society, in a true democracy, each of us will be able to creatively shape the world we live in. Society itself will be one giant artwork that we all collectively produce.” ~Thomas Gokey
National Public Radio—As information becomes more digital, a small number of public libraries are working to create “hackerspaces,” where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools and their expertise.
“We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business. We feel this is really in that spirit, that we provide a resource to the community that individuals would not be able to have access to on their own.” ~Library director Jeff Krull, director Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana
National Public Radio—If you saw the movie Moneyball, you got a taste of Big Data, in that case, using statistics to win baseball games. Big data is huge in both scope and power. Analyzing big data enables anything from predicting prices to catching criminals, and has the potential to impact many industries.
“We have seen the industrial revolution, and we are witnessing a data revolution.” ~Oren Etzioni, professor of computer science at the University of Washington
Businesses keep vast troves of data about things like online shopping behavior, or millions of changes in weather patterns, or trillions of financial transactions — information that goes by the generic name of big data.
Now, more companies are trying to make sense of what the data can tell them about how to do business better. That, in turn, is fueling demand for people who can make sense of the information—mathematicians—and creating something of a recruiting war.
Some Greek towns use a currency called Local Alternative Unit, or TEM in Greek. One TEM is equal in value to one euro.
People sign up for free on the barter network’s website, where they can post ads on what they can offer or what they want. Members exchange goods and services amassing TEM credit into an online account. Some shops also accept TEMs, in the form of vouchers that function like checks.
Mr. Beam, Mo Assem and Ruben van Esterik, offer an instant way to change your interior or exterior space using video mapping.
Video mapping is a technique that uses special software to “map” surfaces with projectors that transfer video onto the surfaces.
IDG—Below, the London agency Studio Output created three cool clips set in a living room that magically transforms into the world of a well-known Hollywood franchise the moment the sole character activates his PlayStation. Each clip was shot in one take, the visual effects created using a mixture of props, live actors camouflaged in Lycra and, crucially, the technique of projective mapping—projecting backgrounds plus animation onto the environment, in this case the walls, furniture and other surfaces in the room.
Everything you see here is 100% for real. No SFX, no post production, no cuts.
By attaching the PlayStation Move to the camera, they were able to track projections to screens in real time, enhancing the effect of spatial deformation and false perspective on the projections and allowing viewers to look round (virtual) corners, bend walls, create a hole in the wall, or remove the walls altogether to reveal vast expanses of virtual worlds.
The agency speculates that this immersive imaging technology could one day evolve into a system where the user dons glasses to view an augmented reality experience overlaid onto real objects in their environment.
“For us, this technology is bigger than 3D. That's how big this could be.” ~Ian Hambleton, art director of Studio Output
National Public Radio—You’ve probably heard that the future of books and libraries is in doubt. In the light of such news, it seems there is nothing any single individual can do but one anonymous person in Scotland has taken action in support of libraries and books by crafting books and their words into such exquisite works of art that news of the creations has traveled worldwide.
Librarian Julie Johnstone at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, was wandering through a reading room when she saw, sitting alone on a random table, a little tree. The tree’s trunk and branches are made from hundreds of cut-out pages and was mounted on a book which had a tag addressed to the library’s Twitter account, @byleaveswelive (a leaf is also a term for a single sheet of paper in a book), which read:
Gorgeously crafted, it came with a gold-leafed eggshell broken in two, each half filled with little strips of paper with phrases on them. When reassembled properly, the strips became a poem about birds, “A Trace of Wings” by Edwin Morgan.
The library staff nicknamed the gift the “poetree.”
And then, it happened again
This time, a coffin, topped by a large gramophone showed up suddenly at The National Library of Scotland. The scene was carved from a book, a mystery novel by Ian Rankin, one of Britain’s bestselling crime writers. It seemed like a visual pun, because the book’s title was Exit Music.
The note reads,
For @natlibscot—A gift in support of libraries, books, words, ideas...(& against their exit).
Next a movie theatre
Edinburgh’s Filmhouse received, out of nowhere, a book carved so that a bunch of warriors seemed to be leaping (or in some cases galloping) off a movie screen straight into a startled audience. One of the audience members, if you looked closely, was wearing a tiny photo of the face of mystery writer Ian Rankin.
The note reads:
For @filmhouse—A gift in support of libraries, books, words, ideas..... and all things *magic*
Enter the dragon
Next somebody found a little dragon peeking out of an egg in a windowsill at The Scottish Storytelling Centre. This dragon was carved, once again, from an Ian Rankin mystery and came with this tag:
For @scotstorycenter—A gift in support of libraries, books, works, ideas..... Once upon a time there was a book and in the book was a nest and in the nest was an egg and in the egg was a dragon and in the dragon was a story.....
Two more for the Edinburgh International Book festival
On a single day, two new sculptures showed up at the Edinburgh International Book festival. Whoever brought them in, got out unnoticed.
One was left on a signing table in the Bookshop.
To @edbookfest ‘A gift’ This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas...... & festivals xx
It includes a teabag filled with cut out letters, on the tag of which are the words “by leaves we live.”
The cup on the top has a swirl of words which read “Nothing beats a nice cup of tea (or coffee) and a really good BOOK,” and on the ‘tray’ next to the cupcake it says “except maybe a cake as well.”
To @edincityoflit ‘A gift’ LOST (albeit in a good book) This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas.... “No infant has the power of deciding..... by what circumstances (they) shall be surrounded..” Robert Owen
The piece is crafted from a copy of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. The book is a favourite of the City of Literature team and is also known to have been an influence on Ian Rankin’s work.
Magnifying the idea of books
Another appears in the form of a book with a magnifying glass made of paper, left on a shelf in the Central Lending Library on George IV Bridge.
Tyrannosaurus rex
The phantom made a new deposit at the National Museum of Scotland. It was hard to notice at first, because viewed from the binding, this book had a suspicious little tail peeking through…
But when you turned it around, there, peeking out of pages was an adorably ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex.
Hidden in the tattered leaves of the book are tiny men with weapons.
“The stories are in the stones”
At the Writer's Museum was a sculpture propped atop the donations box in the Robert Louis Stevenson room. It was a street scene, with birds, people, cobblestones, all under a dangling moon hanging in the sky.
An atmospheric street scene with what appears to be a silvery moon with wisps of cloud hanging from it. This tag reads:
@CuratorEMG A Gift “The stories are in the stones” Ian Rankin In support of Libraries, Books, Words, Ideas ...... and Writers.
Inside the book are people, birds on wires, a streetlight, images behind windows and a pentagram with the signs of the zodiac scrawled in red on a wall.
There are 10, The End
Someone at the Scottish Poetry Library spotted a fresh, handwritten entry in the guest book, which said “I’ve left a little something for you,” at the shelf marked “Women’s Anthologies X.”
There were three objects on the shelf. The first, a cap that could fit on a small head, was fashioned to look like a wren, head pointing forward, the back a puffed up haze of feathers.
The tag on this read:
To @ByLeavesWeLive....... THE GIFTS “Gloves of bee’s ful, cap of the Wren’s Wings.......” Norman McCaig .... maybe sometimes impossible things... In support of LIbraries, Books, Words Ideas....
Besides the cap, was a pair of gloves with the pale markings of a bumble bee.
And, finally, alongside the cap and gloves, whoever it is that makes these things, left an explanatory not that she is not, as many thought, an artist who specializes in sculpting books (“this was the first time”), that these sculptures were thank you gestures “in support of special places,” and that she had no intention of revealing her identity and anyway, newspaper readers across Edinburgh were happy “not to know…which was the point, really.”
Ten gifts. All accounted for. And that, it seems, is the end of our story. Somebody who chose and whose neighbors chose to never identify spent the spring, summer and fall expressing her thanks for the continuing existence of libraries, museums and books in Scotland, “a tiny gesture,” she called it.
The Toyota Fun Vii drives itself, lets you change the body color and the interior design to suit your mood and comes with a genie avatar called a navigation concierge (you can change the clothing and appearance of the avatar or go nude).
If it’s not fun it’s not a car. ~Akio Toyoda, President, Toyota Motor Corp
Once you are on auto-pilot, convert the windshield to a virtual screen and watch movies, concerts, surf the web, video-conference with your friends anywhere on Earth using Skype or play video games like the auto racing game with your choice of race courses. You could basically live in your Fun Vii, working, eating and any other activities all from the convenience of your mobile world.
Wall Street Journal—There is a growing movement to unlock medical secrets by empowering patients to gather, control and even analyze their own health data. Members of this loose collective of amateurs, who call themselves “health hackers” and “citizen scientists,” also perform their own analyses and use the Internet to create and run experiments and clinical trials.
For her 28th birthday, artist/illustrator Molly Crabapple locked herself in a hotel room in New York City for five days, covered the walls with paper and created 270 feet of art in 5 days.
iON’s solution for maintaining your optimal weight:
“Eat and don’t give intention to energy. (instead say) ‘I enjoy my food and I burn every bit of energy that I have.’”
“Don’t think about food as energy because it’s not. A calorie could never make you fat.” (When eating food) “If you’re storing energy, you save it in the form of fat. If you are not storing energy, then you pass it away.”
, on Charlie Rose 
began with his hunch that the wisdom of our grandparents might have more helpful things to say about how to eat well than the recommendations of science or industry or government. 
