Calamityware

This I love.

 

Nice box!

http://designtaxi.com/news/363038/New-Improved-Innovative-Students-Have-Designed-The-Perfect-Cardboard-Box/

A box that, really, opens too easily... but that should be easily remedied. I expect Amazon to snap this one up in the near future.

Lfexible solar panel manufacturers Crystalsol

Just bookmarking this as I've rather lost track of the flexible solar panel market...

http://www.crystalsol.com/engl/index.html

 

3D printed plaster casts

This is definitely an 'oooh pretty' one - certain details of it (the lack of any evidence of analysis, the use of suspiciously feeble-looking snap-fit joints) lead me to suspect it is not entirely practical as it stands.


Still a brilliant idea, though, and no reason why it couldn't work. I give you:

Jake Evill's 'Cortex' 3D printed fracture support

 

AIGA: futurescoping

This may be an interesting insight into how to gather and develop ideas for the future of a professional organization:

http://www.core77.com/blog/case_study/the_aiga_research_project_by_ziba_part_6_the_final_winnowing_-_evaluate_evaluate_evaluate_25808.asp

It may also be a very expensive design consultancy trying to justify their price with a ream of bullshit. Genuinely unsure.

25 Questions to reveal your life purpose

Whether you believe in something like a 'life purpose' or not, I reckon you could do worse than contemplate your life in the view of these 25 questions. Not that I've quite got round to it yet.

This is the point where I should go off into a rant about how 'finding/discovering yourself' is an evil lie, and actually what we are doing, all the time, is constructing ourselves, mostly through our choices of which problems to attack... but I'm going to stop there.

(Lifted from http://www.prolificliving.com/blog/2012/07/24/how-to-find-your-life-purpose/ via shirley's twitter account)

1. What fulfills me?
2. What drives me?
3. What inspires me?

4. What do 1-2-3 have in common?
5. What problem can I solve for others with the common thread in 4?

6. What frustrates me?
7. What pains me?
8. What saddens me?

9. What do 6-7-8 have in common?
10. What problem can I solve for others with the common thread in 9?

11. What terrifies me?
12. What worries me?
13. What can I do to change 11-12?
14. What can I do with this change to help others?

15. What do I love doing?
16. How do I feel when I am doing 15?
17. What happens if I stop doing 15?
18. What happens if I kept doing 15 forever?
19. What do I resent doing?
20. How do I feel when I am doing 19?
21. What happens if I stop doing 19?
22. What happens if I kept doing 19 forever?

23. Why am I here?
24. What am I here to do?
25. What would the world miss if I weren’t here and if I didn’t do it?

Lego faces getting angrier

While clicking around the aforementioned Universal Construction Kit I also came across this article: apparently Lego faces have been getting angrier of the last fifty years. I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise, since when I was a kid none of the spaceships had guns (which simply meant that that was the first thing everyone changed on them) and now it seems like they are all meant for battle of some sort. What really impressed me was they way that the academic in this case seems to have made a respectable career out of playing with Lego - his website is more interesting than this particular story, I think.

How to connect Lego to K'Nex to Duplo to etc., etc.

With the Free Universal Construction Kit!


Basically, some enterprising artist collective with a fondness for dubious acronyms has created a set of 3D designs of components to connect a variety of kid's toys (most of which I haven't heard of, but which includes Lego, and that's the main thing). The aim is to allow people to print these out at home - you have to really go through the small print to find the admission that, unless you've got access to the really high end machines, the current crop of 3D printers can't print at a fine enough resolution to successfully connect your creation to, for example, Lego.
However, it is a brilliant idea.
I also particularly like the following rant from their website - particularly the idea of the commercial system enacted as an infinite series of micro-punishments for us, the humans:
"Consider the frustrating experience of purchasing a new computer (a Mac, say) and discovering that it will not play your aunt’s Windows Media video of your little cousins. Likewise, imagine your aunt’s corresponding annoyance when she finds that her PC will not play the Apple Quicktime video you sent her of your cats. This humiliating little episode isn’t an accident; it’s just a skirmish in a never-ending battle between giant commercial entities, played out, thousands of times every day, in exactly such micro-punishments to customers like you. If you’re well-informed, you may happen to know about VLC — a free, open-source video player, developed by independent hackers as a grassroots remedy for exactly this problem. Until the advent of ubiquitous 3D printing, software remedies like VLC weren’t readily available forhardware products, like toys. That’s changing."

Vibrato on a piano, anyone?

Coming soon on Kickstarter... a multi-touch piano. Although all pianos are multi-touch by definition. Sort of what you iPad piano app would like to be when it grows up.

 

On Cliche: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Song

My name is Matt, and I'm a novophiliac.

I think I always have been, right from when I was a kid. It's actually pretty common, although it's not something that's talked about very often: but I just love new stuff. The old is dull, bring me something shiny. Most of the time, I've got it pretty much under control, but there are a couple of areas where the desire for newness can be a bit of a problem, and one of them is music.

Modern life is saturated in pop music. The format - everybody knows it, three minutes of words and music - is part of the sea we swim in, completely unavoidable, like shopping trolleys, Ikea furniture and adverts for credit cards. However, unlike reading credit card adverts or going to Ikea, it's actually a lot of fun getting together with like-minded people and singing these songs; but when I see these songs written down there is a little part of me that starts to itch. I worry that if I mention it people will think me petty and small-minded, but sometimes it's hard to keep quiet. Oh, hell, I'm just going to come right out and say it.

 When they're written down, most pop lyrics are rubbish. Some of them don't even make sense.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I could be cleverer, so it's possible that there are subtle allusions I'm missing, or that I'm not picking up on some of the finer feelings expressed. And there are honourable exceptions (one of my favourites is Paul Simon, who writes some lovely stuff - I rather like this from his 'Rhythm of the Saints' album:  He says, hard times, I'm use to that / The speeding planet burns, I'm used to that/ My life's so common it disappears). But sometimes I see lyrics written down, and I just think, 'I'm sorry, what?' Call me a philistine, but anyone trying to shoehorn some meaning into, for example, "it's a terrible love that I'm walking with spiders" is stretching the bounds of credulity. Try it. I dare you.

 So, naturally, I start to brood. I mean, this is truly part of modern life, we listen to it all the time - and yet when you see it written down it is a grab-bag of cheap cliche, thrown together into a baffling list of non-sequiturs. How has this taken such  a hold on us? Presumably we must hear something we recognize, something that speaks to us. Is it just that we pick up the occasional phrase that rings true? Or perhaps (and I must have been in a dark mood when I considered this possibility) is it that our lives have that same structure - a series of semi-disconnected cliches?

But that's not the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing is that all these words are rammed into an even more cliched format. How many notes are there on the Western music scale? Thirteen? How many times can you reorganize thirteen notes? (That's one for the maths pedants). Well, okay, but once you've eliminated the hideously discordant options, and thought about the fact that most pop songs follow a startlingly strict recipe (four-four time, verse, chorus, middle eight) and considered how many pop songs are produced every week, you can see there's an awful lot of recycling going on. Which just brings me back to that central mystery: how is it that this endlessly regurgitated pap has managed to keep such a hold over us for so long?

I think the answer is in two parts. First of all, I've been terribly sniffy about cliche so far. But cliches are cliches for a reason. After all, what is a cliche, but an apt description of a common experience? In the endless stream of music and words that roll past us every minute of every day, they crop up time and again because they do a good job of describing something. So to hear them sung back to us should not be a surprise - and it should not be a surprise that we hear some echo of our own lives in them.
More importantly, though, is the fact that a song is not just words, and not just music, but the combination of the two. I read somewhere that humans are the only animals that can appreciate rhythm, which sounds wrong to me because it feels like this stuff goes deep into some pre-human, warmly mammalian part of the brain. A song is the best definition of synergy I can think of, because the whole is infinitely better than the sum of the (cliched, repetitive, sometimes nonsensical) parts. I have to confess, those Paul Simon lyrics I quoted earlier are from a climactic part of their track, right at the peak where the music has been building to and the trumpets kick in. So it's not surprising they've stuck in my head, is it?

So it's okay that there's nothing new under the sun. Maybe it speaks to me because I've been around a while, too. And if some of the expressions are a little careworn, well, maybe not all of my emotions are completely unique. Maybe that's the point.

I still fast-forward past Coldplay, though.

ABMU November 2012 (yes, it's been a while)

Yes, it's been a while since I posted my latest medical update, and you may wonder why. Alternatively, you may wonder why I'm posting one now, and that's probably the more interesting question. At least, that's the question I'm going to answer. The reason I'm posting one now is because I've been reviewing my medical posts and finding them quite useful. And why have I been reviewing my medical posts? Ah, well, perhaps we'd better fill in some background first.

My last medical post, back in 2009, held dark mutterings of redundancy and flat-selling and stress, coupled with a declining response to Infliximab. Looking back, I'd forgotten quite how grim things got, with the anal fissures and the inflammation round the anus. It was not a pleasant time. Happily, my personal circumstances are considerably better now, even if the medical situation is not completely perfect. I have moved down south to be with GF (now fiancée), bought a house and spent the last two years renovating it (a not-entirely stress-free experience). Over this whole period I have been on Infliximab and nothign else, and my response to it has been... okay - in general I've been getting maybe four weeks of good response, coupled with a couple of weeks of gradual decline before the next infusion. This was acceptable - the rough patches were sometimes pretty exhausting, but in general the worst symptoms were diarrhoea and exhaustion. However, over the last year or so this delicate balance has gone slightly awry. First, for reasons I don't remember ever identifying, I started getting problems with constipation. So the first week of my infusion I would get quite badly bunged-up. This would often result in quite bloody stools, and small anal fissures. I would have a week of constipation, followed by a bout of runny stuff, then go back to being constipated, etc. My bum suffered, as did I. Adventures such as taking GF (okay, let's just go ahead and give her a name at this point - she's called Lucy) to Venice for the weekend were traumatic and difficult. That was back in February. So after a few poor months, round about Easter I had a bad flareup and spent a fortnight off work. As a result (and admittedly a few throwaway remarks by yours truly) the hospital decided I was losing response to Infliximab and started talking about putting me into a drugs trial for something new.I went in for an assessment; it turns out I was only just inside the acceptance criteria for the trial - these things are decided by turning questionnaire responses into points, and essentially I managed to duck under the wire because I described my current state of health as 'very poor'. So far, so good. The only catch: I needed to be free of the Infliximab, which meant waiting eight weeks. Now I was presented with a choice - wait a fortnight (it was six weeks since my last infusion) and go straight into the trial, or have one last fling with the Infliximab. Because I basically did not believe I'd lost response to the Infliximab, I chose to have one last infusion. Sure enough, the drug pulled me back up, and I had a good four weeks. But as per the terms of the deal, I waited out eight weeks befoe phoning the hospital and re-engaging with the drugs trial process.
But here's the irony: when I re-did the acceptance questionnaire, it turns out I was too well to go into the trial! The only difference was I wasn't feeling quite so poorly, so had rated my general health slightly better. On the basis of this, I was no longer eligible. Also on the basis of this, the hjospital then decided to mave my infusions to eight weeks apart instead of six. On such tiny flaps of a butterfly's wing, great storms condense.
So fast forward, now to the present day - and I have to tell you, dear reader, the eight-weekly infusions have not gone particularly well. I have started a daily record of how much I poo each day (if you're lucky I'll publish some graphs at some point), and it shows a very steady cycle ove rth elast three months. I get between 25 and 28 days of good response to the Infliximab (by which I mean, pooing once or twice a day, with faeces of a solid nature) - and thereafter a fairly wuick decline ot the point where I am releasing a gush of liquid six, seven, sometimes even eight times a day. Having endured his since May, I have decided enough was enough and called the hopsital. So now I am back on six-weekly infusions... but they have also decided to put me on mercaptopurine, at the same time as the Infliximab.
So this brings me back to the question of why I have been perusing my old blog entries: because I have been on 6MP before, although it was so long ago I had forgotten what it was like. So when the IBD nurse at Addenbrookes asked me questions like "how did you get on with it before?" I suddenly realized I had something better than my own rosy memories to rifle through. Hence, rifling.
I say 'rosy memoies' because the blog posts suggest a slightly darker picture than I'd remembered. My recollection was that the 6MP had been good but not good enough, and I'd had a gradual decline over perhaps a year to the point where I'd ended up changing to a new treatment. However, it looks like the 6MP treamtent coincided with anal fissures... so I am somewhat nervous. Since I have some say inteh process, I am planing to delay the 6MP treatment for a while until we canget some visibility of how going back to six-weekly infusions is panning out.

Thermal imaging on a shoestring

http://publiclaboratory.org/tool/thermal-camera

 

I am so making one of these – who hasn’t wanted a thermal image of their house at some point or other? Brilliant.

When is too young to have a 3D printer?

Well, when is too young to use a computer?

 

I'm pretty jaded about brilliant college projects which are still in the development phase, but this is an intriguing one - a 3D printer aimed at ten year olds. What intrigued me, thouhg, was not necessarily the overarching concept - which is cute and praiseworthy, don't get me wrong - but one of the technical details which I glaned from reading a magazine article about it. Apparently the printing head is st up in a polar arrangement, as opposed to a cartesian one, to reduce movement and wear. I'm not aware of any other printers which do this, certainly not at the lower end of the market. So, that's interesting.

 

Alarming

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/12/google-personalisation-internet-data-filtering

Rather disturbing article, this.

BLDGBLOG: Landscape Futures Super-Trip

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/landscape-futures-super-trip.html
Must remember this itinerary if we ever do a road trip in the States...

"Our stops include the "world’s largest collection of optical telescopes," including the great hypotenuse of the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, outside Tucson; the Very Large Array in west-central New Mexico; the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona, aka the "lunar greenhouse," where "researchers are demonstrating that plants from Earth could be grown without soil on the moon or Mars, setting the table for astronauts who would find potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables awaiting their arrival"; the surreal encrustations of the Salton Sea, a site that, in the words of Kim Stringfellow, "provides an excellent example of the the growing overlap of humanmade and natural environments, and as such highlights the complex issues facing the management of ecosystems today"; the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, with its automated scanning systems used for "robotic searches for variable stars and exoplanets" in the night sky, and its gamma-ray reflectors and "blazar lightcurves" flashing nearby; the Grand Canyon; Red Rocks, outside Sedona; the hermetic interiorities of Biosphere 2; White Sands National Monument and the Trinity Site marker, with its so-called bomb glass; the giant aircraft "boneyard" at the Pima Air & Space Museum; and, last but not least, the unbelievably fascinating Lunar Laser-ranging Experiment at Apache Point, New Mexico, where they shoot lasers at prismatic retroreflectors on the moon, testing theories of gravitation, arriving there by way of the nearby Dunn Solar Telescope."

It’s Not About You - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/opinion/31brooks.html
Is it graduation time again? Already? Where does the tme go, eh? Anyway, an interesting article here which laments the advice given to college graduates - the idea tht they should follow their own paths, live their own dreams... just at a time when previous generations (and in all probability, they themselves) are in the process of tying themselves to a spouse, to a career, etc.

"Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling."

I don't really think we should abandon our dreams and subsume ourselves in othre people's misery as a way of validating our lives, but it does have a grain of truth in it - not sure I could tell you, even now, whether my life is going in the direction it should. Assuming such a 'correct' path could ever exist.

St Petersburg & Moscow

Rafael did this

This has bubbled up to the surface again as I am currently trying to compile the photobook (or as the older generation would have it an 'album') from our long trip to China... so where were we? Oh yes. From Helsinki we took the train to St Petersburg and then onwards to Moscow, spending a few days in each place...

Lego Castles

http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/230059
Ever since I was a kid with a book on castles, I've always had a yen to visit Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, arguably the greatest castle ever built. And today Google suggested "Krak des Chevaliers LEGO"...



... holy crap.

I poked around a little more on the site, and mostly it's pretty... well, fictional and boring (although the siege reenactment from Lord of the Rings looked impressive). But my favourites are definitely the real-life scale models, which require a bit of ingenuity to get the details right. Check out the Belfry:


That's in Bruges, you know. There's some great little details which you can see in the full Flickr set.

Man Goes on Junket to Avery Island, tastes Tabasco sauce. That's it, really.

http://www.doshermanos.co.uk/2011/03/tabasco-getting-saucy-on-avery-island.html
You have to scroll a long way down to get to the story itself, but when you get there I found it quite diverting.

Rotterdam villa collides with mirror, attractive result

Not for anyone with a thing for rounded curves, this... but wow it sure is pretty. The architects claim that all they did was establish the corners of the maximum allowed envelope and join them up, but I've never seen it done like this!


The architects are a firm called Ooze - which makes me think of blobby, amoeba-like stuff rather than than a farmhouse seen through a smashed mirror. If you can stomach their pretentious website, there are a few interesting pictures of the works in progress.