Clipmarks | wildcat's clips

Ads in 'Clouds' Shaped Like Corporate Logos

Sat, 10 May 2008 20:16:56 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: terrible idea...

One expert said the idea sounds catchy, but wonders how Flogos will fare against a backdrop of controlled airspace, environmental sensitivity and concerns over legal liability in case something goes wrong, like a pilot being distracted by a swarm of floating tomahawks above an Atlanta Braves game.

Picture the Manhattan skyline filled with Nike swooshes. Or the golden arches of McDonald's gently drifting over Los Angeles.

A special-effects entrepreneur from Alabama has come up with a way to fill the sky with foamy clouds as big as 4 feet across and shaped like corporate logos -- Flogos, as he calls them.

Francisco Guerra, who's also a former magician, developed a machine that produces tiny bubbles filled with air and a little helium, forms the foam into shapes and pumps them into the sky.

The Walt Disney Co. will use one of the machines next month to send clouds shaped like Mickey Mouse heads into the air at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., Guerra said.

Tags: ads, in the clouds

Quickies: Intelligent Sticky Notes

Sat, 10 May 2008 11:32:16 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.tfot.info

In an attempt to bring one of the most famous inventions of the 20th century into the digital age, scientists of the "Ambient Intelligence Group" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed the "intelligent stickies". These are essentially Post-its with a twist - the notes written on them can be managed by a PC that will be able to remind users of any information stored on the small paper notes at the appropriate time, via a variety of digital devices. In a project that combines artificial intelligence, RFID, and ink recognition technologies, the MIT team says they have managed to make the popular sticky notes much more useful.

Tags: quickies, ai, post-it, rfid, recognition tec

'Technology Is at the Center'

Sat, 10 May 2008 11:10:41 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: a worthwhile read

Clip Source: reason.com

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter Thiel on liberty and scientific progress

I first met Peter Thiel—co-founder of PayPal, angel investor in Facebook, founder of the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, adviser to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and self-described libertarian—at a party in his San Francisco home last September. Perhaps 100 digerati wandered through Thiel’s sleek Marina District townhouse, chatting amiably over wine and canapés in rooms filled with up-to-the-minute abstract art.

reason: Bill Joy, the former chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, declared in his famous article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” that we have to relinquish artificial intelligence, biotech, and nanotechnology because they’re just too dangerous for human beings to handle. Is there some truth to that?

Thiel

: I think it’s not even wrong. It’s one of those things that’s so far off the mark that it is not even wrong.

Tags: singularity, peter thiel

Artificial mouth takes on a chewy problem

Sat, 10 May 2008 11:02:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: technology.newscientist.com

An artificial mouth that can reproduce the mush created by a human munching on an apple has been created by French researchers.

It could form part of a robotic taste-tester designed to improve food quality and our understanding of flavour.

Previous groups have developed artificial mouths that can analyse soft foods or sets of robotic jaws to test teeth. But, until now, none has been able to recreate what happens when a human chows down on hard foodstuffs.

Taste test

Many of the flavours we taste are generated by the release of volatile compounds from food, which pass around the back of the mouth and up into the nose.

Hard foods release those compounds differently according to whether they are crushed, sliced, or liquidised.

So if a robotic system is going to "experience" the same tastes that humans do when eating, the food must undergo the same changes that occur in the mouth, says Gaëlle Arvisenet at ENITIAA in Nantes, France.

Pulp friction

Tags: robotics, mouth, taste

What Happens When the art IS life?

Sat, 10 May 2008 10:53:04 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: quite incredible

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Bio Art: Life Imitates Art. But What Happens When the art IS life?

Well, then the bio-art starts growing out of control and has to be killed by a lone hero. Obviously. That might sound like the script of "Little Shop Of Horrors: The Revenge", but it actually happened in New York this month.

The organic art in question was the piece "Victimless Leather", a tiny jacket grown from mice embryonic stem cells and kept alive by an external life-support system. Yes, you read that right. Artists, working with the SymbioticA research laboratory in the University of Western Australia, grew living tissue into the shape of a tiny leather jacket and cyborged it up with electrical parts. Presumably to give Tom Thumb either a stylish biodegradable look or nightmares for life.

The mini-flesh-threads were designed to raise questions about human use of animals, and it certainly did - even if only by adding the questions "What the hell are they doing with that jacket?"

Is that terrible or awesome?"

Tags: life, art, biotech