The answer to my living room artwork quest

i have a couple of white walls, currently unadorned, so how 'bout this for my flat?

Quite old but...housing that makes your brain hurt

Okay, this is from way back in 2005, but I find it interesting so I'm posting it. So, like, two years ago, an artist called Shusaku Arakawa created the Reversible Destiny Loft apartments, an apartment block designed to keep your brain alert by constantly challenging your spatial awareness. The logic is more or less the same as those road junctions where they take away all the road signs and make it superficially more dangerous in order to get you to drive more carefully; this place uses distorted floors, optical illusions and light switches in counter-intuitive places, in order to keep the brains of the occupants active.

Cripes (more pictures here).

Leaving aside whether one would want to live in these places (and when they first went on the market they went for about twice the normal price of an apartment that size)(which is lucky when you consider how much they must have cost to make - what a fortunate coincidence that the price covered it), this made me think. One of my most valued precepts of design is that any design should be intuitive, easy to use, and generally free up the user to think about other things... and of course, Arakawa is going in completely the opposite direction.

On one level, it's deliciously counter-intuitive, but makes a charming sort of sense - if the occupants genuinely struggle to find stimulation, then here it is, on a plate. But personally, I think this represents a triumph of materialism over humanity. Those who need more stimulation are those who are isolated from human contact - especially the elderly. Making Granny live in a psychedelic obstacle course is going to isolate her further - elderly friends will be wary of visiting such a hostile environment, and she's going to find it harder to get out the door. What's required in such situations is more human contact, rather than more artifacts put in the way. Not for nothing is the architect described as an artist rather than a designer.

I have something of a personal interest in this because I have a granddad who is suffering terribly from Alzheimers. He's unable to distinguish between reflections and the genuine article, he struggles for words, he barely recognizes even his closest family (he certainly doesn't know who I am) - and I think he finds living alone with my grandmother very difficult. And although he's a nightmare to live with, the times I've seen him relax are when there's people around. The TV does nothing - it's hopeless, he can't follow it. People - human contact - is the only stimulation that works. So when Arakawa talks about 'halting mental decline', it's him that I think of - and I can only see him retreating from this environment, spending all day in a chair.

Sure, you'd need to be a pretty sharp cookie to live in this place - but I doubt very much whether living in this place would keep you sharp. I think it would just hurt.

For Dentworth: Boris V, the floor-sweeping robot

Yes, the floor sweeping robot has been given a name: according to my girlfriend, he is now Boris, and he has gone through several more reincarnations since the first prototype I wrote about. In that time I've tried many different variations - most of them variations on a theme of 'combine harvester style Boris', with a horizontally rotating brush. However, those brushes always got choked up with hair, and the gear trains always picked it up and ground to a halt eventually. I tried a servo-powered, more-or-less static brush which only moved when Boris was backing off from obstructions (so he didn't just shove piles of crud to the walls and leave it there) - but the power consumption on the servos was astronomical for some reason, so I ditched that and went back to motors.

This particular reincarnation, sadly, is already dead and gone to make way for a smaller mini-Boris. I found these wide flat brushes resulted in a mechanism which was too low to the ground and picked up crap - same problem as the combine harvester style - so the current plan has kind of gone full circle, and is using the original brushes from Boris1 (which sit much higher up), albeit on a much smaller chassis and without all the pesky gearing down - which I've discovered was probably unnecessary. Ho hum.

Also I have dark suspicions that this particular Boris managed to kill my wireless router - no mean feat considering he never went within a foot of the thing. But the power cables are under the sofa, and when he went under the sofa it was fine, and when he came out the router had died. Muy suspicious. Still, I don't begrudge him that - the router was always dodgy, and it was with some relief that I went to buy a new one.

Of course, in the six months or so that I've been tinkering with this several low-budget, floor-sweeping robots have come on the market, but that's so not the point.

(sorry about the graininess of the photos - I should have put some more lights on when I took the photos!)

Anyone tried Google docs?

Opened up my browser this morning, and Google greeted me with this message:


I'm just curious: has anyone? Is it any good?

Ooo pretty: Explorius Hydrofoil Yacht

Now, I flatter myself that I know a thing or two about yacht design, what with being a designer and having done a lot of sailing and being involved in commissioning two new yachts, so I'm fairly confident that as a real-life yacht this concept is not going to fly (you'll notice how flat the water is in all his renderings)... so I'm clicking through the presentation going 'Nope... nah, don't buy that... not a chance...'... and then I come to pictures like this and I go all gooey.



I just wish I could draw like that, to be honest.

Depressing

Subtopia has an article on inflatable prisons which I am directed to by BLDGBLOG. It makes for pretty grim reading. I knew migration was a problem, but as a solution, these seem pretty inhumane: '“the tents are windowless and the walls are blank, and no partitions or
doors separate the five toilets, five sinks, five shower heads and
eating areas. [..] Lacking utensils on some days, detainees eat with
their hands.”'

Thee's something seriously creepy about these disposable Guantanamos, housing a burgeoning demographic group. Who knows, maybe the next great novel of the twenty-first century will be written about those who live in these growing populations - about their births, their deaths, their lives and loves, entire dynasties incarcerated by a state which provides everything but freedom and privacy...

Call for list: Anyone know any good podcasts?

We've probably done this before, but...

Thus far the podcast revolution has really passed me by; along with RSS, the software managers for it have always seemed intimidatingly difficult to use (and quite resource-hungry). So I've stayed away, and contented myself with radio and TV and internet and all those safe, twen-cen forms of media.

But now I have a nice little podcast client (and RSS - yay!) for my Sony Clie, which is easy to use and not too fat. I've gone looking for stuff; and I've found plenty of enormous directories of podcasts, most of which are bewilderingly vast and badly organised (and most of the podcasts are badly described). I'd much rather go by word of mouth, in any case. So:

Anyone know any good podcasts?

I'm especially interested in sciencey ones or 'green living' ones. Not so bothered about news or current affairs, and anything from the BBC I'll probably have heard on the radio; what I'm interested in is the obscure stuff, the guy in Montana talking into his computer about how he turned his garden shed into a Mars colony simulator, or the architect who's making an audio diary of his tests on making houses out of cardboard tubing, or the relief worker blogging about attempts to organise tea farmers in Turkhmenistan into a fairtrade collective... you know, weird stuff.

So far, I have only one podcast on my machine, and that probably tells you more about what I'm looking for than anything else, so let's start the list with that:

European Space Agency Advanced Concepts Team podcast

So: anyone?

Fragment

The Garden of Martyrs could more accurately be called a cloister, rather than a garden - barely more than a wide, curved walkway, overlooked by the tourists' glassed-in route through the palace, it is one of the emperor's least favourite places. He gives the statues an ill-favoured glance as he strides through.
"You know there weren't even any real martyrs, don't you."
"Majesty." The Chancellor's response is minimal, hoping to cut off the emperor's usual rant before it can start. Above them, the wall of martyrs stands unheeding. Each figure is nine feet tall; their bronze chests are out-thrust, their chiselled features and business suits rendered in bold, planar slabs, in a style which in a previous era would have been more suited to Hollywood cartoons or Soviet propaganda. The arrows sticking out from their chests form a formidable fence, jutting up and out over the two mens' heads.

Housekeeping: Belkin wireless router

I own a Belkin cable wireless router (model F5D7230-4).
Over the time
I've had it, it's generally been rubbish, and certainly never stayed up
for more than twenty four hours. In the beginning, I didn't even notice
the problem, but it got worse and worse - the thing would just stop,
and hang until I turned it off and turned it on again.



Doing some research, I found this is quite common, and the thing is in
general deemed to be a piece of shit. The general advice appears to be
'take it back to the shop and get something that works'; however, being
a lazy soul (and being unsure of what I did with the receipt), I
experimented. I figured it looked like an overheating problem, so:



I took the lid off.



So far, it's been on solidly for about a fortnight, and no problems. It
appears that the heat sink works a lot better without the top shell. So
far so good.



Anyway, thought I'd post this as it may be of help to someone who has problems with this device.

UPDATE: after working for another week, the thing died completely and utterly and resisted all attempts at resuscitation. I have gone out and bought another router from a different manufacturer. I won't be buying Belkin any more.

Salem Witch Hunts and Mooninites

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/02/litebrite_noseb.html
Being savaged by a sociology professor might seem about as scary as having your ankles viciously drooled over by an elderly terrier, but Boston's recent (over)reaction to a viral marketing campaign is given the once-over here by Dion Dennis:
"Not surprisingly, there's been a steady outflow of educated Millennials from the Bay State to points South and West, where a younger, educated demographic is welcomed and treated with greater public courtesy. [7] The Bay State response to a benign set of LED graphics, when compared to how these crudely drawn Mooninites were viewed in other venues across the U.S., makes the point unusually clear."

Via Bruce Sterling.

Yet another reason why we should get off this planet

...because the longer we leave it, the harder it becomes. This NY Times article makes pretty disturbing reading - apparently space junk, once a nuisance, is becoming a distinct threat to future space missions. Of course, it might provide a good answer to The Fermi Paradox - there are aliens on other planets, but they've all trapped themselves under blankets of orbital shrapnel.

Designy tidbits

First of all, a resource: The Design Encyclopedia
seems like it might be a very interesting resource. They're trying to
bootstrap it up to wikipedia scale with a 'fill in the blanks'
initiative right now.

Next... ooo. Gotta love this Electroluminescent chandelier by Naoto Fukisawa.
I have a bit of this stuff knocking aobut, although I'm not sure it's
enough to do one of these. Shame; it'd look fantastic in my bedroom...


Finally, if that's the good, then this is the bad and the ugly rolled into one: a collection of Super Bowl Party gadgets, including a $200 motion sensing trash can. "there's nothing worse than having to step on pedal just to open a
trashcan. You're not a feudal serf! Ditch the medieval tech and go
modern with a waste receptacle that does most of the heavy lifting for
you." I'm sorry, what?