tentacular: A six-issue comic, with a view to introducing a new hero into an existing canon. The economic crisis bites. Flinton, MI, was built on industry, and the industry’s gone, since by far the city’s dominant company took the stimulus cheque, attacked wages, outsourced more and more, then finally all, R&D and production overseas. Flinton, […]
Read more "Rejected pitch"Read moreWriting is a form of Thought Engineering. The works created are Machines that operate on the minds of those that choose to activate them, producing for each a unique result.
This is why the State, in its Monopoly of Force, controls Language. Prohibiting the assembly & distribution of Dangerous Machines that threaten to impair or destroy the operation of its own.
The company’s Recycler robot uses data from a combination of visual sensors, metal detectors, weight measurements and tactile feedback from a robotic arm to pick out likely pieces of refuse and categorise them.
Through trial and error its machine learning software has been taught to recognise around a dozen types of material, including different plastics. And it can pluck out concrete, metal and wood from a stream of waste as it moves along a conveyor belt.
For more ambiguous types of waste, such as a piece of plywood with nails driven through it, the robot uses a spectrometer to recognise objects based on the unique patterns of light they reflect. This means the robot can distinguish the type of waste based on its colour and drop it into the appropriate bin.
Garbage-sorting robot gets its hands dirty – tech – 06 April 2011 – New Scientist
– ideally we’d not only deploy these in every rubbish dump in the world, but start digging up every land fill site too.. that’s valuable stuff down there, basically for free.
It was already known that green algae lived inside the eggs of this species – the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum), which is very common in North America.
Although these salamanders only emerge from beneath the ground to hunt and breed, they lay their translucent eggs in ponds, where they are suspended near the surface. This makes an ideal, sunny and protected environment for the algae.
“The eggs actually look green because the algae is inside the egg capsules,” explained Dr Ryan Kerney of Dalhousie University, who led the research.
“The algae inside the egg capsules provide oxygen to the embryo and the algae gets waste from the embryo [which is rich in the nitrogen the plant needs].”
Although this relationship had been known about for more than a century, scientists did not understand how the algae got into the egg.
from BBC – Earth News – Plant lives inside animal: algae invade amphibian cells
Read moreThese are what the Victorians would have called occasional pieces: ‘on the occasion of the great earthquake.’ The form is an ancient one, but the platform is up to date. … In the past, it was gathered after the fact. Now, we have this facility to respond in real time.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1
Konstruct, a new free iPhone app from London-based AR-developer James Alliban, makes creating virtual sculptures as easy as speaking into the phone. The app uses an existing vision tracking system in combination with a printable marker – a piece of paper with a specific pattern that the software recognizes. You put the marker wherever you want the sculpture to exist, start the app, then speak into your phone’s microphone to create 3D objects in the scene. There are different settings for color schemes and shapes. As long as the marker is onscreen, the app allows the user to keep refining the sculpture.
New augmented reality app unleashes your inner artist
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 