2NE1 - I Don't Care
via youtube.com
Which group do you prefer?
A softer version of shapelock (aka polymorph)?
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This is Jane. She's from Ireland and she's lovely. Jane was studying product design at RCA London when she had an idea: "I don't want to buy new stuff all the time. I want to hack the stuff I already have so it works better for me." So she phoned some clever materials scientists called Ian and Steve and together they invented an interesting new material for hacking things better. It's called sugru and is a little bit brilliant.
Finally, somebody summarized the myths that non-Chinese Americans have about Chinese food. Most of what White Americans consider “Chinese food” is mostly eaten by white people, and would be more accurately described as “American food” (and perhaps even “white people food”)
Here are some important points from the video:
* Fortune cookies are almost ubiquitous in “Chinese” American restaurants, but they are of Japanese origin. Most people in China have never seen fortune cookies. Fortune cookies were “invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, and ultimately consumed by Americans.” Fortune cookies are more American than anything else.
* General Tso’s chicken is unrecognizable to people in China. It is the quintessential American dish, because it is sweet, it is fried, and it is chicken.
* Beef with broccoli is of American origin. Broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable; it is of Italian origin.
* Chop suey was introduced at the turn of the 20th century (1900). It took thirty years for non-Chinese Americans to figure out that chop suey is not known in China. “Back then”, non-Chinese Americans showed that they were sophisticated and cosmopolitan by eating chop suey.
* “Chinese” take-out containers are American.
* There is Chinese French food (salt-and-pepper frog legs), Chinese Italian food (fried gelato), Chinese British food (crispy shredded beef), Chinese West Indian food, Chinese Jamaican food, Chinese Middle Eastern food, Chinese Indian food, Chinese Korean food, Chinese Japanese food, Chinese Peruvian food, Chinese Mexican food (which look like fajitas), Chinese Brazilian food, etc.
* If McDonald’s is Microsoft, then Chinese food is Linux.
Can you tell which is the fake hand?
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The german company handprothese specializes in prosthetics with ultra realistic fluid motion. their robotic hand prosthesis attaches to the users body, linking their hand with their arm muscles. when the user contracts their muscles to move their hand a sensor picks up a signal to make the hand move accordingly. The hand’s movement is made ultra realistic thanks to miniature flexible fluid actuators to create the organic movements and a cosmetic cover that makes it look like a real hand. in addition to being realistic, this technology makes the device light, compact and inexpensive. the hand also allows adaptive grasping to hold things securely and each finger can move its position.
Awesome under-actuated robots by Peter Steinkamp.
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The devices shown here were created to explore aspects of regular, step-wise locomotion where the only energy input required is gravity. The first models were attempts to find a non-collision version of the "Wilson Walkie" type of ramp walker. These maintain constant surface contact and move with a rolling, non-scrubbing motion. Another goal was to see how this movement could be achieved with as few moving parts, or degrees of freedom as possible (see "single piece walker"). The hopping models demonstrate passive, persistent hopping with regulated descent down the ramp. A future goal is to incorporate this motion into a passive bipedal running robot. Please feel free to contact me with questions or comments via the email link below. Copyright © 2006 Peter Steinkamp.
Hod Lipson didn’t set out to revolutionize manufacturing. He just wanted to design a really cool robot, one that could “evolve” by reprogramming itself and would also produce its own hardware—a software brain, if you will, with the ability to create a body. To do this, Lipson (below, center) needed a rapid-prototyping fabrication, or “fabber.” Picture a 3D inkjet printer that deposits droplets of plastic, layer by layer, gradually building up an object of any shape. Fabbers have been around for two decades, but they’ve always been the pricey playthings of high-tech labs—and could only use a single material.
“To really let this robotic evolutionary process reach its full potential,” says Lipson, a Cornell University computer and engineering faculty member, “we need a machine that can fabricate anything, not just complex geometry, but also wires and motors and sensors and actuators.” Lipson and his grad student collaborators, Dan Periard (right) and Evan Malone, decided to put the problem to the people. They developed a low-cost, open-source fabbing system—Fab at Home—and encouraged experimentation by starting an online wiki for hobbyists. People report printing with everything from food (Easy Cheese, chocolate), to epoxy, to metal-powder-impregnated silicone to make conductive wires.
A Fab at Home kit costs around $2400. Lipson compares it to early kit computers such as the MITS Altair 8800, which democratized computer technology in the 1970s. At-home fabrication, Lipson says, “is a revolution waiting to happen.” As for that robot? Wait a year, he says, and it really will walk out of the machine.
The method Gwon uses to create these life-size replicas is complicated and can take two months per sculpture. He starts off taking thousands of photographs of his subject from every imaginable angle. He then sculpts a life-size core out of lightweight foam and begins the painstaking process of attaching the photographs, then coating the entire sculpture. The result is somewhat reminiscent of a cubist painting, but with much more depth and character. He doesn’t aim for ultra-reality; he instead wants to portray the way that everything we see is distorted somehow.
Ever Curious
