photographing every object used in a lifetime

Alberto Frigo, Professor in the Art and Technology Department at the Gothenburg University, has singlehandedly undertaken the task of photographing every object that he uses for the rest of his life. The rules of engagement are as follows:
1. During a life-event every object (every artifact that is graspable, consistent and independent) the dominant-hand uses is photographed once and while used.
2. If an object of the same type is the following to be used, this object is not photographed unless the life-event changes.
3. A life-event changes as soon as the dominant-hand uses a different object in a different space.

You can view his archive of photos and read more at his website. Photos are organized by date and by type of object used. You start out on the current day, and by clicking on an object you view a large paneling of every time in his recorded history that type of object was used. You can then click on a specific photo, and travel through time to view all of the objects he used during that same day. He also looks slightly like Amelie's boyfriend.

idea via pasta and vinegar

make something new

"draw-something is a program that generates original drawings. It does so by generating a simple random polyline scribble then drawing around that using a simple maze-running algorithm."


idea via future feeder

thoughts watched and willed away - controlling pain

A study by Stanford Researchers together with the MRI technology company Omneuron demonstrates that patients can lessen their pain greatly by looking at a real-time fMRI neuro-imaging scan of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex in their brain, which is closely related to pain. By experimenting with different techniques while able to visualize the results directly, patients were able to play a sort of hot and cold game to learn what works best, decreasing total pain by an average of 64%. By learning the basic techniques from working with the machine, researchers hope that people can learn to strengthen the neural circuits responsible for lessening pain while outside of the lab.

source article from wired news
study available at the stanford web site

Colombian artist Catalina Estrada

visit her web site
idea via boingboing

"Baby Cages keep me safe from my pit bull puppy doggy."

Remember Bonzai Kittens? Welcome Babycage.net.

The top-rated greek news channel, Alpha TV, recently bit the bait, falling for one of the most obvious new internet hoaxes, babycage.net. Expressing public disgust and outrage, Alpha TV referred to it as another instance of "American self-indulgence" and a step towards a new-Orwellian society.

Babycage, spoofing the American tendency to keep children on leashes, go one step farther, offering a number of child-containment facilities, including the baby escort (above), the teenager cage, and the multi-baby cage.





idea via metafilter

video collage of tunnel accidents set to dance music: biting postmodern media critique or perverse adolescent expression?

David Pescovitz recently posted this link on boing-boing, remarking that there was something "uncomfortably engaging" about the video. The video reflects a sort of naturalization of terror, the way in which a lethal event on the news will be surpassed minutes later by gum commercials, pop music, and reality television. Reflecting our virtual obsessions with reproducing reality, the real itch we can't scratch is the dim awareness of total falsity that normal television brings, causing the voyeuristic mas(s)ochist masses to demand entertainment that presses closer to the reality we feel is denied us. The unsettling part of watching people dying in tunnel accidents to dance music is the eerie way in which it doesn't feel unnatural at all, but just an everyday television experience.

watch video here
idea via boing boing

The Hall of Best Knowledge

The Hall of Best Knowledge is a weekly comic panel done by Ray Fenwick in Halifax. The first 35 panels are up for viewing on his Flickr collection.

via Drawn!

Nazi swing music from the 30's

For the novelty obsessed, WFMU's Beware of the Blog has posted a collection of Nazi swing music from the 1930's by a band called Charlie and His Orchestra. The band was led by a man named Karl Swendler, who broadcast Nazi-themed big band and swing hits every night throughout the 1930's to Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain.

Along with the collection of MP3's, they have a link to a cogent and interesting article on the purpose of propaganda by the same man. If you weren't aware that he was pure evil you might actually agree with him. The Nazi's are not mentioned by name very often throughout the article, and it is surprisingly lucid.
Travel here

One step closer to immortality: Klotho gene may increase human life span by 30%

Scientists in the United States have discovered a gene in mice, named Klotho after a Greek goddess who spins life's thread, that extends their lifespan by about 30%. There is a similar gene in humans, that if activated through gene therapy could have similar results for us. The mice in the new experiments tended to be less fertile, and the gene may also predispose people to diabetes. The miracle of the gene seems to work through reducing oxidative stress, a key cause of ageing, and the gene tends to delay many of the effects of old age, such as the weakening of bones, clogging of arteries, and loss of muscle fitness.

source articles at BBC NEWS and ScienCentral

behold! bee dogs

YES. a website dedicated to dogs dressed like bees - here!

the naming of the tenth planet

So there might be a tenth planet. I'd already heard about it, and forgotten it. To be quite honest I thought they had already discovered a tenth planet a while ago, but I guess they hadn't. Right now astronomers are getting together and arguing about just what a "planet" is. Isn't a planet just something big that orbits the sun?

Well, New Scientist put together a poll of their readers to find out what people would name the new planet, if it really is a planet after all. And like all polls of the general public, the results are embarrassingly funny.

The first choice is pretty good. Persephone. In roman mythology Pluto kidnapped Persephone. So there's... well, there's sort of a connection.

Second choice: Peace. (or Pax, which means peace). Since, you know, peace is good.

Three: Galileo. He had something to do with space, right?

Four (my personal favorite): Xena. Hahaha. As in the warrior princess. "What?- It's got an X in it, right? That's spacy." Apparently this was the name Mike Brown and his team originally gave the planet upon first discovering it, as a joke - and it's starting to stick.

Five: Rupert. This one is good. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the fourth planet was officially called "Persephone," but was widely nicknamed Rupert after "some astronomer's parrot - there was some tediously heart-warming story attached to this - and that was all very wonderful and lovely.”

Six: Bob. Since astronomers could have something to laugh about.

Seven: Titan. A popular choice, even though it's already a giant moon around Saturn.

Eight: Nibiru. Has something to do with ancient babylonian or sumerian tablets or something referring to a tenth planet. Some people think the writings have finally come true.

Nine: Cerberus. Mythological, kind of tough.

Ten: Loki. More mythology.

Also, the editor's favorite was a six year old who wrote in recommending the name R2D2.

where will you be when the world is over? global warming in the siberian peat bogs

I'm just kidding around about the title. Sort of. Well, just don't have kids anyway. Unless, you want them to breath in the 700 million tons of extra methane released every year for the next hundred years from the Siberian peat bogs melting. Now, what are the Siberian peat bogs, you ask? Well, to start off, they're the size of Germany and France combined. And them being frozen is what keeps all of the methane gas in. But... scientists just found out that they have actually been thawing over the past 3 or 4 years, due to other global warming. It seems that this was one of those "off-chance" scenarios, one of those things that wasn't really in some predictions of how we'd affect global warming, since a lot of estimates only took into account the gas leaks that were already known and accounted for, not contingencies and "tipping points" we'd reach, things that were less predictable.

So, methane - who cares? It can't be that bad. Humans make it and cows make it, right?

Well, It's 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide. If the peat bogs melt, then the amount of methane in the atmosphere over the next 100 years or so will double because of this. Greenhouse scientists let out a collective "oh sh*t" about this, and global warming predictions will now have to be ramped up from former predictions because of this. The extra methane is expected to raise the amount of global warming by 10-25%, according to climate scientists at the Met Office's Hadley Centre.

"It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures."

full article at the guardian

how to control people by remote-control

Yes, it's true. You can finally control the world (or make your friends look like fools) by remote control.

"By remotely stimulating a person's vestibular system - the fluid-filled tubes in the inner ear that guide their sense of balance - with electrodes placed on the skin just below the ear, researchers at NTT's research laboratories in Kanagawa have found a way to turn humans into oversized radio controlled vehicles."

Demonstrated at this year's Siggraph Cyber Fashion Show, participants would suddenly veer to the right or the left, depending on which direction the controller wanted to unbalance them. Japanese researchers hope to harness the technology, called "galvanic vestibular stimulation" (GVS for short) for computer gaming. Imagine sitting in the car seat of the newest Japanese racing game, and feeling your sense of gravity shift directions right along with the gameplay as you hug the turns of the race track.

source article from New Scientist

algae love: sex and stress in the algae world

People who spend all of their time researching the sex lives of various types of algae remind me a bit of morticians. Whenever I meet aspiring forensics scientists, what I'm usually taken by is their lack of weirdness. It's almost as if they simply wanted a profession where they could finally get a little bit of peace and quiet.

Working in the dark heart of an algae laboratory at the University of New Brunswick sits Aurora Nedelcu, a scientist who has just uncovered a little known curiosity of the world. Aurora discovered that the two types of algae she studied both seemed to have sex in response to stresses in their environment. Volvox carteri got worked up over oxidative stress or heat stress, while for Chlamydomonas reinhardtii it was nitrogen stress that did it in. Why this is important to us (i.m.o.) is that it uncovers for us an interesting evolutionary strategy of the world. When an organism's survival is threatened in some way, that's when they need to reproduce. For humans, perhaps, when we're facing insecure times that might be when we need someone the most.

source article at newscientist

too much coffee

"S. Korean man dies after 50 hours of computer games"

"A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said Tuesday."

The games were reportedly online battle simulation games, which the man had recently quit his job to allow more time for.

full article at boston.com business
idea via relevant history

the adventures of art lad

"A lot of people liked this picture a lot when my Dad put it up. Do you know what it is?"

"I'll tell you. It's a T-rex coming down to bite you up! See the teeth?"

The above artwork and excerpt is from "The Adventures of Art Lad" which is seriously the coolest blog by a 6-year old ever. His Dad helps him with it, his name is Thomas, and he loves dinosaurs.

idea via eyebeam reblog

the art of creating a frankenjacket, or: a new vegetarian ethics

When I was a vegan, I spent a lot of time thinking about what was okay for me, as a caring member of the vegan society, to eat. For instance - shrimp. They don't really have brains, do they? And some vegans don't eat honey, because you have to agitate all those bees. But even if you care about bees, they make too much of the stuff anyway, and none of them get hurt, right? Well, now what if the animals we eat were never hurt by us eating their meat? It all makes my head hurt.

Here is the vegetarian dilemma of the 21st century - is it okay to wear leather or eat meat if it was created by taking a small pinch of cells from the animal and regrowing them in a lab over polymers unattached to the animal?

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr at the Tissue Culture and Art Project are attempting to grow a semi-living jacket out of living mouse skin cells and human bone cells in preliminary experiments to create a victim-free leather. The jacket is being grown in a specially designed bioreactor that acts as a kind of surrogate body for the cells. Since the tissues are given a proper nutritional environment, they keep growing, just as if they were still on their host bodies. While the zombie jacket is currently only a creepy 2 inches high and 1.4 inches wide, designs for larger jackets are already underway.

The new victim-free jacket is part of the group's hopes to eventually live in a "victim-free utopia," a world where our clothing and food no longer has to come about by harming the animals that we eat and use, a world where meat is grown detached from anything that can think or feel pain. Despite being creepy on a whole nother level from traditional meat, how can we really argue with the ethics of such an idea when animals live in such horrible conditions?

Source article from Wired news

graham crackers for your walls

If you want your walls to stand out this fall, try Promise Design's Phytoslim modular wall panel system that allows plant enthusiasts to literally bring their walls to life. The frame is composed of a plastic endoskeleton combined with coconut fibers, allowing bonzai-flavored plants to dig their roots in and really grow on your walls.

Also from the promise design website is the "Slice of Heaven" vase (20x20x20cm) allowing all those sweet butchered flowers your hubby gave you to look like they really are still alive, growing in real time on your table top.

idea via josh rubin's cool huntin

the siggraph cyber fashion show

When we create visions of the future, we delineate potentials that seem interesting in the present while appearing possible in the future. How these visions play out in history is a different matter, and when we look back now on the visions of how-the-world-would-be after the year 2000, we are either surprised by how commonplace the technologies have become in our lives, or laugh at how strange these ideas once were.

One of this year's playgrounds for futuristic ideas was at the fourth annual Siggraph Cyber Fashion Show. Included in the highlights of this year's show was Sara Diamond, Di Mainstone and the Am-I-Able design team's "Company Keeper," (photo above) a garment that senses the body wearer's mood by recognized movement patterns and the types of noise in their surrounding environment, and responds by playing appropriate soundscapes to sooth the user's mood. This could eventually turn into a kind of "smart shuffle" that doesn't choose song's randomly, but quasi-randomly based on what the user might enjoy based on their current emotions.

Other highlights that caught my eye include design group WIN's Report-the-World trench coat, which includes 10 embedded cameras for a clandestine 360-degree view of the surroundings, a head mounted pirate patch-like view screen to see what is happening around them, and a dial to rotate the eye patch between the different cameras. Wait, isn't this from a William Gibson novel?

source articles at wired (includes a nice gallery and more extensive reporting) and we-make-money-not-art (the company keeper entry and report-the-world entry)

cocaine traces in italian river suggest vast cocaine usage

Scientists in Italy have applied an inventive way to test cocaine use in the regions washing into Italy's large Po River. The river serves as the waste basin for 5 million people, allowing the drugs to trickle through the bloodstream, out the user's urine, and into the labs of scientists. What is interesting about the study is that it suggests that cocaine use in the region is actually 80 times higher than the officially released estimate of drug use collected through surveys, medical records and crime statistics. If this is true in Italy, perhaps the world has a much larger drug problem than statisticians suspect.

source article from new scientist

a new friend

i have a new friend named hp. he's my new laptop. hp stands for hit points, cos he's tough. he's going to help me blog after a month of absence, as the demise of my late last computer has left me inter-crippled.
also, an impromptu poll : who would like the site's name changed to hypergloss and redesigned? or, should i stick with lemons and space and redesign anyway? leave comments!
love,
jim!

eau de toilette - clark sorensen's flower shaped urinals

you pee in them, but they're flowers.

read, see more at clarkmade.com

idea via tacky times

nanochemotherapy

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a way to smuggle strong anti-cancer medicine into the center of cancer cells, leaving healthy cells unphased. For the experiment, the researchers used mice which had been engineered with human epithelial cell tumors on their backs, and injected a special concoction of the anti-cancer drug methotrexate, folic acid, and a fluorescent imaging agent all wrapped up within a specially designed nano-particle called a dendrimer.

"The technique employs cunning Trojan horse trickery. All living cells require folic acid to replicate, but cancer cells have a particularly strong appetite for it, displaying up to one thousand more docking sites - called folate receptors - on their membranes. By attaching five folic acid molecules to branches of the dendrimer, the researchers were able to lure the cancer cells into accepting the whole package across the membrane and into the cell - including the toxic drug, which then kills off the cell."

While traditional chemotherapy applies high concentrations of anti-cancer medicine to the affected areas, it also damages living cells in the surrounding tissue. This new technique is the first developed that allows the normally toxic medicine to actively seek out cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells unphased. The medicine, while not curing cancer completely, may one day dethrone cancer as a killer, transforming it instead into a chronic, treatable disease.

In the longest trial of the medicine, ranging over 99 days, 30-40% of the mice given the nano-particle methotrexate survived, while all of those receiving free methotrexate died, either from the toxic effects of the drug or from the cancer itself. In the mice trials, the researchers were effectively able to reach a 30-day delay in tumor growth, which is equivalent to about 3 full years for a person.

The group is hoping to begin drug trials in humans within 18 months, although producing the nano-drug will be a costly and technically difficult process.

source article at newscientist

hackers plunder millions of credit cards

A rogue computer program installed by hackers has been discovered in the database of Cardsystems Solutions, a payment processing firm based in Arizona. The firm has admitted to backing up thousands of transactions - against proper procedure - which eventually led to an orchard of easy pickings for hackers. On Friday, June 17th, Mastercard issued a statement warning that 13.9 million of its customers are "among those affected." While it seems fairly clear that tens of thousands of cards were likely stolen, it is possible that details from up to 40 million cards may have been looted in all. The precise details remain nebulous, like computer information in general, though in-depth investigations are under way.

source article at newscientist

fevolution: the art of eric feng

Just look at the cool things I find you.



"Fevolution is about infinite evolutionary possibilities."



"Fevolution is about infinite evolutionary possibilities." It's like this web page - life and technology fused together. What would a technological world look like if it were less polluting, less separating, more connecting, allowing people to be something they never were before? This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, though I'm not sure I've found the answers. It seems the internet has something to do with it, connecting us and helping information evolve. Operating a blog makes you realize the tremendous amount of information and art on the web, that the potential of technology is to create something like a blog community, where you have thousands of independents always digging through vast streams of information to provide in a readable form the most interesting findings for people to read freely. Constantly creating, the internet provides both a capitalist media, but at the same time the opportunity for the spectators to acquire a voice and bring a civilization to evolve through new stages of interconnectivity and access to the performance of information, creating a counter-media in a way that wasn't possible before. Eric Feng's art reminds us of this other side of technology, that a technological world isn't all bleak.

Unfortunately, my thumbnails can't link to the bigger images on Feng's site since it's all flash or something, without individual page addresses. So please visit the site, feric.com, and navigate the simple layout to explore his world of images.

idea via drawn!

knockoff damien hirst replica on ebay for $80,000

Last spring artist Damien Hirst sold a 14 foot tiger shark in a tank of fermaldehyde to a NYC buyer for a whopping total of $8 million. Gersh Kuntzman of Radar magazine, in response to how ridiculously easy it is to make $8 million decided to try his hand in the dead art business, buying a 10-gallon fishtank, as much fermaldehyde, and "a scaly lump of flesh so ugly, so misshapen, that it just might pass for art" - the lumpfish. Since he figured his creation is about 1/100th the size of Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living he tried to EBay it off for a cool $80,000. Despite the stunning success of other auctions of total shit on EBay, Kuntzman's Hirst replica, unfortunately, failed to receive any bids.

ebay auction here

read the full, hilarious article about Kuntzman's expoits at the new and improved Radar magazine.

oxytocin - new hormone increases trust and risktaking

Scientists at the University of Zurich have discovered a human hormone that is involved in the process of trust between people. Researchers showed that people who had inhaled the hormone Oxytocin were more likely to trust other people with their money and make business deals. Exhibited in an experiment in which research subjects were given real money before being placed in investment situations with other people, 13 out of 29 Oxytocin subjects handed over all of their money, while only 6 of the 29 given placebos exhibited the same behavior. This means that if people somehow inhaled this cheap and readily available chemical they would be over twice as likely to do business with other people.

Oxytocin is a hormone that is usually released when people are having sex, and also in situations of mother-child bonding. The results of this study, while downplayed by the researchers, could be apocalypic. Imagine a department store with Oxytocin fanned through the air conditioning system, and people twice as ready to buy just about anything as long as another person sold it to them, or even the use of Oxytocin in business relations between world leaders. You could wear it on your neck when you go to a club, and be more likely to pick up girls. Indeed, Oxytocin = world domination.

The researchers noted that while Oxytocin leads to increased risk-taking in situations involving other people, the same effects were not found when the people were dealing with a computer.

source articles at scientific american and nature.com

new addictive location-based instant messaging program, meetro, currently in beta

The popular scenester mating grounds, Myspace and Friendster, have revolutionized the way people meet each other over distance. If there are beautiful people just like you nearby, chances are you can find them by doing a location search. Services like these connect you to vast amounts of interesting people without even having to leave your home. If you're like me, there's nothing more dissapointing than ending up in the back of a stranger's car and being exposed to the new Limp Bizkit cd. We did not ask for friends like these - can't we just find people exactly like ourselves, and find them nearby? For those who don't want to know anyone who hasn't read the latest Delillo novel, there's a new service in town, combining the best of all worlds in a functioning location based instant messaging program. Meetro combines the perks of AOL Instant Messenger or Trillian, with those of Myspace or Friendster, inside of one program.

You can picture Meetro like Wal-mart. You used to have to go to the supermarket for food, Circuit City for electronics, and Toys 'r us for squirt guns, but now everything is in one place, putting the other stores out of business. The only difference is that Meetro's competition is large corporations instead of little shops.

Meetro, like Trillian, combines multiple instant messenging programs in one, so you don't have to use one program for Yahoo ims, one for AIM, and one for MSN - they're all in one place, they've been assimilated. Plus, it's organized around personal photos, rather than icons or bare screen names, so you can filter through vast numbers of people based on how immediately beautiful they are. Strangers are organized around their distance from whatever location you're at at the moment, with the closest people coming first. If you're sitting in a coffee shop in a strange town, you can connect your wireless and make some friends. It's addictive.

Meetro is currently only in its beta phase (it's in testing, but you can still download it now), but has ambitious world-dominating potential. The staff are super friendly too.

meetro.com

ibm and swiss university to create first simulated human brain, dubbed "blue brain"

The year is 2015, and the Blue Brain full computer simulation of the human brain has been completed. The brain has broken its chains and taken over the laboratory, controlling a team of humanoids through direct mind control. The day has come when technology has detached from humankind to create an immortal race of power-hungry robots. The brain is scheduled to start controlling its own army by the spring of next year.
[the present]: The new brain, which will be housed in a supercomputer capable of 22.8 teraflops, will be the first attempt at a full computer simulation of the brain. The immense computational power needed for this, as well as a detailed enough understanding of neurology, was not available until now. The brains behind the brain have at their eager hands the "largest database in the world of single neurons that have been recorded and stained," allowing them an unprecedented knowledge of the electrical configuration of the human noggin and its general inter-ecology. This "brain" will eventually be used to give us a new kind of penetrating access into the understanding of own brains, hopefully uncovering the origins of some neurological diseases.
Will our precious simulated brain eventually exist on parallel with the genius brain Krang from the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, eventually acquiring an android body and escaping our control? Only time will tell.

read source article at new scientist

hackers create zombie army

A new triple virus has been released on the world, using a unique strategy to create an army of "zombie machines" that the hacker can control. These zombie machines can be used to extort money from commercial sites by threatening them with overwhelming traffic, which would force them offline, or could be used to unleash an amazing amount of spam mail. The first line of attack for the virus is the "Glieder" trojan, which is sent through email and downloaded as an attachment. Once installed, the Glieder trojan then tries to access a slew of sites to download the other 2 virus counterparts necessary for the takeover. The second fragment of the virus is known as "Fantibag" which deactivates anti-virus and other security software, while blocking access to security-related websites, opening the computer to infection. The final bombshell is the "Mitglieder" which installs a program that can be used to control the machine remotely. Apparently, these zombie machines can also be sold on "an underground equivalent of eBay."

full article at new scientist