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Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:
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From UK Vogue, "Tales of the Unexpected," starring Tim Burton, Helena Bonham Carter, assorted models, and various others in a strange, surreal reenactment of some of Roald Dahl's greatest hits, James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory among them. Shot by Tim Walker, the set includes eyeball play, interspecial love, and a crazy lift. (Via NOTCOT.)
I've never liked the idea of conferences calling themselves "summits." Too often they are self-parodies. Too self-important. And often anything but summits, excluding people who would be at a summit if there ever were one. 
And of course that's just the beginning of submission. In the end we all submit to the grim reaper. That's just how it is. And I think the folk who have summits are fighting the inevitable as well, sooner or later no one cares what any of us thought, the world goes on. As some great French philosopher once said, the graveyards are filled with people who were indispensible. In much the same way, so are summits.
NubTalks is a bimonthly series of talks. They are held in the Cambridge area and cover a diverse set of topics. If you can't get there in person, feel free to download the audio or video and join in at your leisure.
This week there are two discussions. Since this is a new series, they have not settled into a permanent home. Check the site to see where it is, in a basement, museum, restaurant, classroom at MIT or someplace else.
A New Kind of Prank Science
This talk is the story of Alec's birthday present and the month of planning, discussion and story building that went into the half-hour scenario we put him in as his birthday present. It's the story of a different way of showing a friend that you care about him, about pushing a prank to a level where none of us knew what the outcome would be. It's a space of pranks that, to our knowledge, hasn't really been explored, and is simultaneously liberating and exciting and scary.
Tin Can Telecommunications:
Sam Smiley is a media artist and educator, and is one of the think tank operators of media arts collective AstroDime Transit Authority. The AstroDime Transit Authority is a Think-Tank and public service organization that considers issues of transportation, communication and world and intergalactic citizenship. We are specifically interested in issues of race, class, gender and culture with respect to how our human transportation and communication systems are constructed
In his talk, Sam will demonstrate and discuss demonstrate the iCAN and the Party Line, communication technologies pioneered by Astrodime.
More on astrodime
nubtalks is created and organized by nublabs.
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If we are going to solve our current economic problems, our President needs to get first hand information on the impact his proposed policies will have on real Joe the Plumbers. People who are 1 person companies living job to job, hoping they get paid on time. We need to know what the impact of his policies will be on the individually owned Chrysler Dealership in Iowa. The bodego in Manhattan. The mobile phone software startup out of Carnegie Mellon. The event planner in Dallas. The barbershop in LA. The restaurant in Boston.PE Obama’s 1st Big Mistake (Blog Maverick)Entrepreneurs that start and run small businesses will be the propellant in this economy. PE Obama needs to have the counsel of those who will take the real risk inherent in creating companies and jobs. Those who put their money and lives on the line with their business.
Without it, the rules of unintended consequences of any economic policy could hit you in the mouth in ways you never expected. Things like forcing companies from being taxpayers to the underground cash economy, or forcing new hires to be independent contractors to avoid having to pay their insurance or higher matching social security amounts. Your current group has no one with 100pct of their networth on the line. I promise you that the possibility of losing it all will provide a completely different perspective than any of the “knowledge” the esteemed, learned members of his current advisory team offer.
Rachel Wright makes the most fantastic anatomical art dresses, bringing anatomy to fashion in such a poetic and lovely way.
More:
Anatomical Fashion on the runway
Skeleton Cardigan - CRAFT Video Podcast part 1, part 2, pattern
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In a New York Times op-ed today, Al Gore (or should we say, @al_gore) reprises some of the themes he spoke of at this week's Web 2.0 summit. Snip:
THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.The Climate for Change (NYT, via @timoreilly)The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet. The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.”
To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.
Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.
Previously: Web 2.0 Summit Videos: Lessig, Kelly, Al Gore, many more
Photo: "Treasure Island / The Island" by Aaron Escobar, Creative Commons licensed, on Flickr.
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Looking back on a surreal campaign season (In These Times, thanks Ned Sublette)In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today. Maybe we could welcome our current situation—torn by another illegal war, as it was in the ’60s—as an opportunity to search for the new.
Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics but as fully mobilized political actors. Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.
We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide. Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and prison abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of working people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people courageously pressing for full recognition.
Yet hope—my hope, our hope—resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.
History is always in the making. It’s up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this earth both hopeful and all the more urgent—we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history.
We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.
We have to agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights, learn to build a new society through our self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles.
At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”
In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.
Tonight's broadcast of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes includes a segment with correspondent Scott Pelley about black market dismantling of highly toxic electronic waste, or "e-waste," shipped from the US. The process of reporting the story turned out to be pretty hazardous, too:
Jumped by a gang of men overseeing the e-waste operations who tried to take the CBS team's cameras, Pelley’s crew managed to escape and bring back footage of the hazardous activities. Pelley's investigation will be broadcast this Sunday, Nov. 9, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste (CBS News)The Chinese attackers were trying to protect a lucrative business of mining the e-waste-junked computers, televisions and other old electronic products-for valuable components, including gold. "They're afraid of being found out. This is smuggling. This is illegal," says Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a group working to stop the dumping of toxic materials in poor countries that certifies ethical e-waste recyclers in the United States. "A lot of people are turning a blind eye here. And if somebody makes enough noise, they're afraid this is all going to dry up."
E-waste workers in Guiyu, China, where Pelley's team videotaped, put up with the dangerous conditions for the $8 a day the job pays. They use caustic chemicals and burn the plastic parts to get at the valuable components, often releasing toxins that they not only inhale, but release into the air, the ground and the water. Potable water must now be trucked into Guiyu and scientists have discovered that the city has the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. Pregnancies in Guiyu are six times more likely to result in miscarriages, and seven out of 10 children there have too much lead in their blood.
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Deep Blue costume - one of my favorite costumes this year! Sponges writes-
Let me set the scene a bit: It's the summer of 1997 and World champion chess player Gary Kasparaov has been beaten in a six game match by two wins to one with three draws . But not by another man. A machine, built by men, has beaten him. IBM's Deep Blue could evaluate up 200 million positions per second, and capable of calculating 11.38 Gigaflops.
In honor of that stunning piece of engineering, I set out to make a suit, that, upon wearing it, I would be transformed into the most logical of logic machines ever built, a chess playing computer! It is not a perfect replica, by any means; I took many artistic liberties. I was inspired by Deep Blue's portrayal in S2E20 of Futurama, Anthology of Interest. It is rather the stylized idea of Deep Blue, the pop culture impressions of a thinking machine trapped in a big black box.This costume took quite a bit of work, and erm, it was a bit on the more cumbersome side. But whose else has a mainframe costume? Incidentally, it was so cumbersome that It took me about 15 minutes to shove my way from one side of First Avenue to the other, missing the costume contest registration by just a few minutes. Once there I promptly put it in the coat check so I could breathe.
The frame of the costume is the remains of several cardboard boxes spliced together with duct tape, and the "thinking" lights on the front are controlled by the innards of about 27 little electronic dice, all wired together in a monstrous chain. Another set of lights scrolls back and forth over the speaker grille sorta like KITT, making the AI presence ever clearer. I added a pair of intake/outtake fans so I could breathe ever so slightly better inside, and finally a voice changing box to speak in a robot voice and say great classic things like, "Pitiful creature of meat and bone," and "How about a nice game of chess."
More:
Chess champion loses to computer - and- IBM please open up Deep Blue already..
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Medix's hard drive laser shutter via Hacked Gadgets.
Retro Tennis for Two on display at the Brookhaven Lab in celebration of its 50th anniversary @ The NY Times...
“I BRAG to people that I was probably the first kid to play a video game,” said Robert Dvorak Jr.
That happened half a century ago here at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where Mr. Dvorak’s father had assembled what was arguably the first video game, called Tennis for Two.
The game, primitive by modern standards, featured two control boxes whose buttons prompted a bright green ball of streaking light to bounce back and forth over a symbolic net. The action took place on a round oscilloscope screen that measured all of five inches across. “It was very simple to operate,” said Mr. Dvorak, now 57 and an electrical engineer in Saugerties.
As a child, Mr. Dvorak periodically tagged along with his father to the laboratory, and he fell in love with the fledgling electronic game on one visit. “I remember it being a lot of fun,” he said.
“When you look at Pong, they’re not all that different,” he said, referring to the 1972 Atari game.
More:
Video Games – Did They Begin at Brookhaven?
There are lots of reasons why we should be weaning our society off of carbon based fossil fuels and moving to sustainable, renewable fuels.
Pick which ever reason you like and get to work:
Security: Do we need to barricade solar panels and wind mills like nuclear power plants?
Decentralized power: If a corporation owns the nuclear power plant, coal fired plant, natural gas plant or other big energy producer, then will they have your interests in mind as they make decisions? Would the same be true about a person who has a windmill on his or her property? Who should be in control, the corporations or the people? Both?
Safety: Have you ever seen a car burning with a with a full or partially full tank of gas? It is quite a sight when the tank blows. If it spills, then the gasoline makes a big mess. Lots of kitty litter. Are gas stations known to be clean? Would you grow food on the same property as the coal power plant or nuclear plant? Would you grow food at the base of a wind mill? How about next to a solar hot water installation? Would that be safe?
"Magic": Creating energy out of 'nothing' is pretty much magic, at least it seems that way. You don't have to ship wind from across the world. Sunlight falls on the ground if we don't intercept it with a solar panel. There are other examples for each renewable energy source.
Making your own power is fun: Make some electricity today. Shake a flashlight, crank up a radio, charge a cell phone with light, heat your snack with the sun. You may just be surprised at how fun it is to generate electricity or capture heat.
Because we can: Generating more of our own power is something we can do. If we do it, we will have to learn more about how things work. We will have to learn about making systems function. It won't be entirely easy, but it can be done. So why not give it a shot?
Social Justice: In the news today, pay attention to the countries mentioned as having the worst human rights records. Then check out whether they have oil reserves. They probably do.
Buy Local: If we spend our energy dollars on oil that has been shipped from across the world, we are sending dollars outside the country. Do they need it more than we do? What are they going to do with our money? What could we do with that money?
Limited supply: When is/was/will be peak oil? US peak oil happened sometime in the early seventies. It was predicted by M. King Hubbert during the fifties that the US would use up the half of the oil in the ground in the seventies. Do you hear much about Pennsylvania crude anymore? He is credited with Hubbert's curve, and often is credited with the term Peak Oil. He made other predictions about world oil supply and when it would peak. Oil will not last forever. How come we don't use whale oil to provide us with light at night? Whale oil used to be a big industry.
Build a new industry: If the technologies for harnessing the energy of the sun and planet come from the US, then the jobs, profits and credit for the solution also goes with the US or whoever actually solves the problem.
Fossils are from the past, not the future: We are going to move away from fossil fuels eventually. Fossil fuels are not renewable. We use them up much faster than we can replenish the supply. The last drop of oil will never be pumped. The last drop will remain in the ground because it is too impractical to extract it. Why not move towards energy independence because we want to create something better? We could wait for $7 a gallon gasoline, but then we are not working from a position of strength. In the face of rapidly fluctuating energy prices like we have seen in the past couple of years, we have reduced the amount of energy we are using. We don't have to do it in a panic. We can make this transition with a sense of patriotism, environmentalism, personal finances, curiosity or whatever positive motivator we want.
Many people don't know how to move towards using more renewable fuels. Take some simple steps yourself as soon as you can. Make some electricity yourself. After you make it, find out how a part of the system works. It is usually simple stuff that just seems complex. If you turn a dc motor, it can be a generator. So you can convert your muscle power, or water falling, or a spring unwinding into electricity for light, sound, computing or many other uses. Solar garden lights are pretty cheap these days. Get some and see how they work. See what you recognize in the system and learn from there.
How can we begin doing the important work of teaching people to be more careful with the energy we have, and generate more of it ourselves? What is the best way to teach about energy generation? What can kids do to make their schools and homes more energy efficient? How can we encourage students to show us the was towards a more secure and sustainable future?
Feel free to add ideas in the comments that suggest a constructive path towards our future energy system.
Mr.Solar has some good information
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If you're prone to scratching or loosing your Wii games, there's a way to back up your games to DVD and play them later. An alpha copy of Wii Backup Loader was leaked to the public a while back, and combined with the hack to enable your Wii to run homebrew, this will allow your Wii to play burned DVDs without a modchip.
Instructable user thundaboy1047 put together a guide for downloading and installing the necessary software.
Run Backups on any Wii Without a Modchip [via Lifehacker]
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Krištof Kintera likes to make people nervous...
He installs spinning circular saws in gallery floors, and rigs the plug at the end of an electric cord to release 50,000 volts in short bursts.
Artworks that, just like your neighbor's homemade flamethrower, scream "Stay away, don't touch!" and then, after the initial jolt of fear, turn out to be super fun.
The Czech artist's latest cringe-inducing masterpiece, Do it yourself (after Brancusi), is a 23-foot stack of cement bags that tilts dangerously to one side, looming over spectators.
"Everybody has the intense feeling that this tall tower is about to fall over," Kintera says cheerfully. "It could fall, but it won't," he adds, "and I won't tell you how it's done." Those looking for reassurance should visit his website for the list of building materials. Here's a hint: styrofoam.
Even his non-threatening works are subtly disturbing. Something electric, a coconut that bobbles absurdly at the end of an extension cord, is hardly dangerous, except perhaps to its creator, who built it out of an eccentric motor and a BASIC Stamp microcontroller.
"I blew up many, many models while building it," Kintera confesses. What's the point of such a senseless appliance? He responds with a typical artist's riddle: "I like to use ready-made materials the way other sculptors work with clay. They're the clay of everyday life."
Despite all his provocative intentions, however, Kintera is still a handyman at heart. "For me, when a piece is finished, it loses its sense of tension and adventure," he says. "You can only experience that thrill when you make it yourself." Or when daring your buddy to touch the sparking end of that live wire.
From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 15, page 19 - Eric Smillie.
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