Entries Tagged 'cool' ↓

Gizmodo’s bullpen five minutes ago. Me: “Holy f*ck. Check this.” Matt: “We’re all dead.” Me: “We’re so f*cked.” Wilson: “Soft robotics. That’s a scary phrase.” Jason: “You mean a sexy phrase. Mmmm. Soft robots.” Wilson: “Now, jamming skin…

That is sexy. Jammable slurry. Wow, a little hot under the collar here. This really is nuts.”

It is really nuts indeed: A shape-shifting robot blob that can squeeze through cracks. Sounds familiar? Of course it does. But clearly, this iRobot and Darpa researchers don’t read or watch any Sci-Fi material whatsoever.

In any case, ladies and gentlemen, it has been a pleasure and a privilege writing for you. Now, enjoy the rest of your lives. They won’t last much more. [JWZ via Make]

How did an interview recorded 40 years ago win a 2009 Emmy? We have a long gestation time, YouTube, and peace to thank, reports the Observer.

In 1969, then 14-year-old Jerry Levitan made his way to John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto, elbowed a long line of press out of the way and somehow convinced the famous Beatle to give him a 40-minute interview. The conversation made its way from reel-to-reel tape to an animated short almost 4 decades later and was posted to YouTube in 2007.

Created with director and animator Josh Raskin and illustrator James Braithwaite, the 5-minute animation was originally developed to be included on DVD with Mr. Levitan’s book, I Met the Walrus: How One Day With John Lennon Changed My Life Forever. Since being posted to YouTube the short won Best Animation at the Manhattan Short Film Festival and was nominated for a 2008 Academy Award.

This year, I Met the Walrus went up against an “All My Children” video podcast, the New York Times Style Magazine screen tests and other notable nominations to win the “New Approaches – Daytime” award at the 36th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards.

The animated short features audio footage from the interview as its soundtrack, with Lennon imparting messages about peace being in the hands of the people even in a time of war. Its visual style is wonderfully playful, intelligently cartoonish and stylistically appropriate to the subject, being almost reminiscent of some of Lennon’s own illustrative work from his published works.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think. Is the film and its attendant story about an unlikely meeting between a teenager and the then biggest star in the world worth its accolades? Do you think I Met the Walrus succeeds, as Jerry Levitan hoped, “something that I thought John would love”?

I Met the Walrus

Image courtesy of Roy Kerwood

Tags: animation, Emmys, john lennon, the beatles, youtube

When Jay Leno replaced car parts, he could only print plastic molds in 3D. Life’s easier now, because mold’s are unnecessary in the creation of custom desk kitsch and car parts as 3D printing got a stainless steel upgrade.

21 days and $10 per cubic centimeter is all you need after you send a CAD design to Shapeways, a company who began offering 3D resin and plastic printing quite some time ago. There are specific size and detail guidelines to keep in mind due to models being printed in layers, but based on the moebius strip complete with moving parts, those guidelines can’t be all that limiting. What’s going to be your first 3D steel print? [Shapeways via PopSci via CrunchGear]

Dig this vintage clip of the late Carl Sagan explaining the 4th dimension with a trip through “Flatland.” And it is a trip. Of course, the weird realm of Flatland was first proposed by Edwin Abbott in his 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. (via The Daily Grail)

Jonas Jäger has taken this whole augmented reality thing from oh-cute! status to holy-frack-that’s-cool position. His business card will make the owner appear like a 3D hologram, displaying Twitter information in real time, plus all kinds of cool stuff.

Not surprisingly, according to Jonas, his inspiration for the Augmented Business Card was Star Wars:

While developing my concept it was very important to me that everybody should be able to create such a businesscard and present himself to the audience. Also i am a Star Wars fan and i liked the idea of displaying the person as a kind of “hologram” :)

The good news is that everyone in the galaxy—the Galaxy of Dorks—will be able to get this: The source code will be available soon in his website. [Toxin via Make]

by Tisha Leung

Swedish paper manufacturer Whitelines’s new collection of handsome notebooks feature white-ruled lines instead of standard blue or black on a light gray, non-glare paper. Their concept is simple: dark lines distract, white lines don’t.

For those who like to sketch as well as write, the set-up eliminates visual competition between the lines, the paper background and and the pen color, allowing the artist/doodler/wordsmith’s work to stand out. Available with either graph lines or straight lines, they disappear if copied or faxed.

Not only does the collection support the creative process, but Whitelines labels all of their notebooks with their C02 footprint (professionally calculated by North Environment & Weather Agency) with a near zero carbon footprint in producing their paper overall. Their state-of-the-art paper mill reuses CO2 in a process where more carbon dioxide is absorbed than emitted. To minimize emissions from transporting the product from Sweden to its destination Whitelines ships large batches which also act as ballasts to control the ship’s buoyancy and stability for the ship. Nevertheless, the company offsets the pollution it does create by planting trees in Uganda. Its goal ultimately is to prevent CO2 rather than compensate, and move to a zero footprint.

They’re available from Amazon.

RC Car aficionado Masami Hirosaka does more with this little car in one minute than I’ll hope to do with a real one in my entire lifetime. Notice he doesn’t use the wall as leverage, either. [YouTube via Japan Probe]

Parsons student Justin Blinder created the Arduino-based Snoozy the Sloth stuffed animal as “an intimate, yet passive, toy interaction that relaxes and comforts a user.” Cuddly, or creepy?

Snoozy the Sloth from Justin Blinder on Vimeo.

The sloth doll uses an Arduino microcontroller, two diaphragm pumps, and a latex glove to act as the “lung;” Blinder makes it clear that he wanted not the illusion of breathing (by having, for example, a mechanically contracting and expanding chest) but the actual intake and expulsion of air. In other words, this thing can gently breathe on your neck, which sounds about the same mixture of creepy and cute as The Police’s “I’ll Be Watching You.” On the other hand, we could totally see kids loving this: They go crazy for dolls with semi-animate features, like giggling Elmo or those dolls that pee (weird!). And kids have less experience than we with machines behaving badly, anyway, so their innocent little minds can enjoy the doll without fear of, you know, horrible robot murder. [Official Site, Thanks Justin!]

Did you know that this kind of thing was even possible? The video shows Danny MacAskill. who rides for UK trials bike company Inspired Bicycles, shredding it in Edinburgh. As our own Danny Dumas says on Twitter*, “From what I gather this is parkour…done with bicycles.”

Keep watching. If you think it’s all over after the first couple of minutes, it isn’t. The video just gets bigger and better as it goes on.

Inspired Bicycles – Danny MacAskill April 2009 [YouTube via Danny Doom]

Product page [Inspired Bikes]

*Normally, of course, Danny’s answer to the Twitter question “What are you doing?” is “Styling my hair. My beautiful hair. In the mirror.”

Artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz cast life-sized candles of themselves in beeswax, then watched their waxy doppelgangers melt.

Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz

(via Street Anatomy)