Grope for Luna: technology

Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

A collection of submissions to a contest from a Facebook page that is now closed and has moved. House Special is a design firm based in Portland. LAIKA/house, their former Facebook page had these pictures submitted to a contest.

And the two winners:

best robots as of 2014

time lapse videos of Earth from satelites

"Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures [form] a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984."

These pictures do not do the videos justice. Click the link at the very bottom of this post to watch the full videos.

Dubai is not the only city whose growth is documented in the archive. The entire Earth is expected to be available. At the link, watch many metropolises from around the world develop from the mid-seventies through to today.

"Since NASA launched the first Landsat satellite in 1972, the program has been in constant operation. Seven other satellites followed the first into orbit over the years, sometimes replacing ones that had reached the end of their operational life, sometimes joining ones still in operation. The most recent member of the fleet, Landsat 8, went aloft in February. At an altitude of 438 miles (705 km), the satellites make one orbit of Earth every 84.3 minutes. Keep that up for 41 years, maintaining a photographic record of your travels, and you compile a whole lot of pictures — millions of them, which have since been digitized into petabytes, or billions of bytes of data."

Watch the videos and learn more here.

gamer soap

If you miss the 80's, you can now reminisce in the shower while you clean yo'self.

Avail (nintendo cartridge) and Avail (game controller), $16.95-$24.95 per little cube of soap.

3-D print yourself

First, you'll need to make a scanning appointment, because this is the sort of thing that needs to be done in person. Once you're at the facility, prices for the scan and figurine will cost you about $400-$2,249 (depending on size). That's still less expensive than some collectibles out there, and as far as desk decorations go, it sure beats the heck out of a framed family photo.

Via, Avail ($499 for 1/12 size figurine; $2,249 for 1/5 size figurine)

Biological Art

Mollie Manier of Syracuse University dyed sperm to watch them glow and investigate their travels. Sometimes good science makes for intriguing entertainment.
Via.

Check out better Medical imaging from Hybrid Medical Animation.

Many more, from Battlestar Gallactica to Mario Brothers, to Star Trek here.
Via.

Cute goldfish.

Make your own this free pattern.
Via.

In other news... Biology art.

I'm going to Rotterdam until Tuesday evening.

I'm going to Rotterdam until Tuesday for the Society for Text and Discourse's annual meeting. I'm looking forward to meeting Herbert Clark and Danielle McNamera, along with seeing talks by Jean Fox Tree, Rick Dale, Dale Barr, Adrian Bangerter, Art Graesser, and Michael Schober... among others. I might not be posting for a couple of days. I leave you with these random technologies and crafts.

Here's a robot you can make out of paper or cardboard:

Visit this blog entry for a downloadable template.

Here's a rotating rock climbing wall:

It senses where you are with lasers and rotates (or stops rotating) depending on your movement as you climb it. there's a video here.

There's a whiskered robot rat at the University of Bristol. Also see my previous post about the University of Bristol's robot Jules.