In defence of the knife

Years ago, when I was a design student, we were given the task of
finding an object that spoke most strongly to us - our favourite
possession, really - and standing up and talking about it to the
class.Most people chose gewgaws, emotionally important things which
they'd carried with them for years.



I chose my kitchen knife.



As you might guess, brandishing a foot-long knife in front of a bunch
of people you've only known for a few weeks and saying "This is my
favourite possession" got something of an adverse reaction, and as a
result I had to work quite hard over the next few weeks to reassure
everyone that I wasn't some knife-wielding nutter. I wrote the
following little piece to explain - mostly to myself - what it was
about the knife that I admired and appreciated. The other day I came
across it again, and thought I'd share it with you.



The knife caused a lot of amusement
when it appeared. It is scary to have someone you're not entirely sure
of stand up with a knife and say 'this is my favourite posession'. The
answer I gave at the time was partial and incompletely considered, and
every time I see the knife now, I want to correct that.

Hence this document.

The reasons for my attachment to my kitchen knife begin with the Ocean Youth Club, where
I learned so many important lessons - to cook, to sail, and to accept
people. I learned there the benefits of having a sharp knife for
cooking, and that a blunt knife is much more dangerous than a sharp
one. I learned, too, that one sharp knife can be put to many uses - it
can crush garlic, shave cheese, open packets, stir things....
basically, only one tool is utterly, unquestionably vital in a kitchen,
and that is the knife. Everything else is optional. A sharp edge and a
fire - that's all you need to cook food.

I learned, too, that a sharp edge is the last resort in a wide range of
situations (not counting the diplomatic!). If a rope gets caught around
something (or someone), then a knife is the final solution when all
else has failed. A sharp edge can be used to wedge, to lever, to split,
to unscrew, to hold flat. The sharp edge is Man the Toolmaker's first
and final tool, the first mark of civilization and intelligence. It is
the last thing a person in the wild will do without, and the first
thing they will seek to reproduce. The knife, to the human race,
represents survival. It is the bottom line, the ur-tool, the first word
ever spoken in our lexicon of things. For that reason alone, it
deserves a special place in our consideration.

But there is more to the kitchen knife than simple age. Countless hands
have used it over the millenia, and the knife, perhaps more than any
other device in the object lexicon, shows evolution at work. Just as
nature has devised combinations both weird and wonderful, and also
elegant and simple, so the simple sharp edge lives with us now through
a million avatars. But perhaps the greatest miracle of all is this:
that each one, specialised as it might be for its own task,still
retains some of the versatility of that basic sharp edge. That is a
rare and wonderful thing, and is perhaps the best reason why any knife
should retain a special place in the materialist's pantheon.



So the knife is the ancestor, its sharp edge Eve to the Adam of the
blunt object. Its children have evolved and developed so that they fit
into many hands, performing wildly different tasks perfectly, yet still
retaining the flexibility of the original. So why, of all the knives in
Christendom, do I like my kitchen knife the best?

There are many answers, but the most fundamental are these: because it
is designed for cooking, and that is what I most often use knives for;
because it is very simple, and the qualities the knife embodies - age
and evolution - deserve simplicity; because its simplicity is made of
curves, and I like the way it looks. Because it fits my hand, because
it does its task well, and because of all my belongings, it has the
greatest chance of living to be as old as me. My knife embodies a
story, and that story is one of age and evolution, and ancestors in all
walks of life, from the cleaver in a West End restaurant to the swords
of the crusaders. It is the story of all human survival and all human
civilization.

That's why my knife is one of my possesions which speaks most strongly to me.

In defence of the knife

Years ago, when I was a design student, we were given the task of
finding an object that spoke most strongly to us - our favourite
possession, really - and standing up and talking about it to the
class.Most people chose gewgaws, emotionally important things which
they'd carried with them for years.



I chose my kitchen knife.



As you might guess, brandishing a foot-long knife in front of a bunch
of people you've only known for a few weeks and saying "This is my
favourite possession" got something of an adverse reaction, and as a
result I had to work quite hard over the next few weeks to reassure
everyone that I wasn't some knife-wielding nutter. I wrote the
following little piece to explain - mostly to myself - what it was
about the knife that I admired and appreciated. The other day I came
across it again, and thought I'd share it with you.



The knife caused a lot of amusement
when it appeared. It is scary to have someone you're not entirely sure
of stand up with a knife and say 'this is my favourite posession'. The
answer I gave at the time was partial and incompletely considered, and
every time I see the knife now, I want to correct that.

Hence this document.

The reasons for my attachment to my kitchen knife begin with the Ocean Youth Club, where
I learned so many important lessons - to cook, to sail, and to accept
people. I learned there the benefits of having a sharp knife for
cooking, and that a blunt knife is much more dangerous than a sharp
one. I learned, too, that one sharp knife can be put to many uses - it
can crush garlic, shave cheese, open packets, stir things....
basically, only one tool is utterly, unquestionably vital in a kitchen,
and that is the knife. Everything else is optional. A sharp edge and a
fire - that's all you need to cook food.

I learned, too, that a sharp edge is the last resort in a wide range of
situations (not counting the diplomatic!). If a rope gets caught around
something (or someone), then a knife is the final solution when all
else has failed. A sharp edge can be used to wedge, to lever, to split,
to unscrew, to hold flat. The sharp edge is Man the Toolmaker's first
and final tool, the first mark of civilization and intelligence. It is
the last thing a person in the wild will do without, and the first
thing they will seek to reproduce. The knife, to the human race,
represents survival. It is the bottom line, the ur-tool, the first word
ever spoken in our lexicon of things. For that reason alone, it
deserves a special place in our consideration.

But there is more to the kitchen knife than simple age. Countless hands
have used it over the millenia, and the knife, perhaps more than any
other device in the object lexicon, shows evolution at work. Just as
nature has devised combinations both weird and wonderful, and also
elegant and simple, so the simple sharp edge lives with us now through
a million avatars. But perhaps the greatest miracle of all is this:
that each one, specialised as it might be for its own task,still
retains some of the versatility of that basic sharp edge. That is a
rare and wonderful thing, and is perhaps the best reason why any knife
should retain a special place in the materialist's pantheon.



So the knife is the ancestor, its sharp edge Eve to the Adam of the
blunt object. Its children have evolved and developed so that they fit
into many hands, performing wildly different tasks perfectly, yet still
retaining the flexibility of the original. So why, of all the knives in
Christendom, do I like my kitchen knife the best?

There are many answers, but the most fundamental are these: because it
is designed for cooking, and that is what I most often use knives for;
because it is very simple, and the qualities the knife embodies - age
and evolution - deserve simplicity; because its simplicity is made of
curves, and I like the way it looks. Because it fits my hand, because
it does its task well, and because of all my belongings, it has the
greatest chance of living to be as old as me. My knife embodies a
story, and that story is one of age and evolution, and ancestors in all
walks of life, from the cleaver in a West End restaurant to the swords
of the crusaders. It is the story of all human survival and all human
civilization.

That's why my knife is one of my possesions which speaks most strongly to me.

IWOOT: Unto This Last

This is a concept which has me really excited. Via Treehugger, this London-based store produces all its furniture onsite, using Scandinavian plywood and a big computer controlled milling machine. Named after John Ruskin's book 'Unto this Last', which was published at the height of the Industrial Revolution and advocated a return to individual craftsmanship, it seems kind of ironic that the very machines he railed against have finally enabled the business model he espoused to be revived. I love the idea, but my Inner Cynic can't help wondering how much flexibility there really is in the system - I mean, in principle you could get them to make a shorter table for you, but it's not as if you could go in with your own CAD file and get them to make it, is it? Is it?

Got to admit, though, the furniture is lovely. I particularly covet the Greg Lamp - go have a look!

 

P.S. Anyone else tried posting via email yet? I posted this via email and had to log in and clean it up - somewhere along the line it had made a fantastic mess of the picture/link combination. And added about a million line breaks.

Wee-urhd

A fluorescent rabbit?


While footling around in the archives of we-make-money-not-art (a fantastic site I highly recommend) I came across this. It occurred to me that the current renaissance in traditional artistic
techniques might have its roots in a backlash against precisely this
sort of stuff, because, really, is Alba art? Or is she just a rabbit
that glows in the dark? Bizarre and trangressive, or just a relic of
what was state-of-the-art 6 years ago, but is now a pretty workaday
hack? Should we liken it to displaying a computer with purple wallpaper?
Or is it a desperate statement about our genetic heritage - our very
selves - under siege from technology?

At the same time, I've been reading an article about
neuromarketing, by a guy called Clive Thompson. Neuromarketing is
basically putting people in MRI scanners to determine their responses to
various brands. It seems a little post hoc to me; although I can see
that it may have some use in directing adverts, brands take a while to
develop and instant fixes like this don't seem to me to be offering
much. And as Chris points out in his article, we don't really know that
much about the brain; it's a bit of a stretch to infer that men who have
the same area of the brain stimulated by pictures of faces and of sexy
sports cars are therefore thinking that the front of the car looks like
a face. But anyway; this is all about our sense of self, too. The
techniques he describes are all about finding products we identify with,
and which stimulate the same areas of the brain which light up when we
think about ourselves, and what we want - in other words, when we
consult our own internal model of 'me'. Personally, I can't help
thinking that the staggering revelation they'll come up with is: sex
sells. But that aside, it's fascinating that our internal models of
ourselves can be identified so closely with products, isn't it? Just
goes to show how elastic they are; and how materialistic we've been
trained to be.

Bling Tartan

Which Tartan would suit me for my brother's wedding? And help me with the girls, obviously.

Bling! Bling! Go for the red and yellow, be not ashamed!

 

 11

Ancient Hunting - restrained but different?

 

 12

It's a proper occasion, don't mess about - Modern Hunting.

 

 17

My brother is getting married next year, and because I now live in Scotland (which obviously makes me Scotchish) I've threatened to wear a kilt to the wedding. Apparently we have some distant family tie to the clan MacMillan, so I looked up their clan tartans. There are several, most of which seem fairly inoffensive, but the one which would seem to be most correct is the red and yellow number above. A little on the bling side, I fear. Reckon I could get away with that? Or should I go with the more sensible hunting tartan? Of which there are two:

The Macmillan Hunting (ancient)

The Macmillan Hunting (modern)

All of these look slightly different (or completely different, in fact) depending on where on the t'interweb you look. At some point I'll get my arse in gear and go down to the shop and have a look through the Big Book of Tartans. But in the meantime, waddya think?

Odd

Just plain silly.



Incidentally, why does Multiply's spell checker think I'm Spanish?

Terrorism, IMHO

I'd like to contribute to the vast outpouring of text which will
accompany the rather scary events of today... if you've managed to avoid
the news (how?) then the government is claiming to have foiled a major
terrorist threat to blow up aeroplanes between the UK and the USA. All
the airports on this side of the Atlantic are completely log jammed, as
draconian security measures are implemented - shoes are X-rayed, and not
even spectacle cases are allowed as hand luggage.

I've been meaning to write something about terrorism anyway, so let's
see if I can't get some sort of coherent policy together here.

I want to make a couple of almost-unrelated points. The first is to do
with the role of terrorism in terms of war, and the practice of killing
people. the second is to do with terrorism and its relationship with
technology.

To start with, the idea of a 'war on terror' is, I believe, an empty
slogan, and one I disapprove of. Before 9/11, it was not unusual to hear
the phrase "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
Curiously, though I haven't heard it that much recently. I suspect it's
because we've become targets, and all of a sudden the situation has
polarized; indulging in seeing both sides of the argument doesn't seem
quite so attractive now, as opposed to when these guys were trying to
blow people up in foreign countries (where they do things differently).

Let me also say this: I believe terrorism is valid as the last weapon of
the dispossessed. Or more correctly, those who believe they have no
other option. If some authoritarian state invaded Britain, and I was
left with no other means to resist them, then causing disruption through
fear might be my final tactic, before I was hunted down and killed. If I
can't rule it out for myself, then how can I rule it out for others? The
problems come when we look at that pithy definition I just put forward.
The young men who (for example) attacked London in July were members of
British society, with a vote each. They were no more politically
dispossessed than I; and yet they felt driven to this. I've tried to ask
myself why - I pride myself on empathy, I think it's very important -
but I can't understand. For all our current government's shortcomings
(and I really won't go into that), they're still subject to the workings
of democracy, and eventually - eventually - they must come to heel,
because they can be voted out. I am not disenfranchised. Nor were they.
If other methods are open to you, then terrorism cannot be acceptable.

(let's throw in an interesting fact here - apparently 40% of British
Muslims aged 18-35 (ish) believe Princess Diana was killed by the
British establishment because she was about to marry Dodi al Fayed - a
Muslim. That was on a Jon Snow program on More4 the other night, called
"What Muslims want")

This brings us to the second point I wanted to raise, which is to do
with the relationship between terrorism, democracy, and technology.
First off, it's fairly obvious that it's a lot easier to get hold of
deadly stuff now than it was twenty years ago. This is a trend which can
only go one way - material goods are becoming cheaper, information is
spreading more widely, it's inevitable that bad people are going to get
their hands on nasty stuff and that this will happen more often.
Secondly, and more importantly, the fact that extreme views can now be
spread more widely thanks to technology (I'm think mostly of the
internet, but that trickles through to other media too) has two results:
one, those with a predilection to believe this stuff are more likely to
be exposed to it; and second, they will come to understand how isolated
their views are from the mainstream. In previous eras, politics was much
more the preserve of those who cared enough to take it up, and they were
more often the ones with extreme views - so the silent majority stayed
silent, and the extremists got a disproportionately large amount of
influence, which suited them just fine. But it also made them more
likely to use conventional politics to achieve their ends. Now, however,
when the mood of the population can be much more accurately judged,
politics has become more and more about the centre ground, and the
extremists are being sidelined. It's ironic, but I think the very
mechanisms that are allowing us to get closer to the ideals of democracy
(for better or worse) are encouraging those with extreme views into
extreme actions.

40% of British Muslims aged 18-35(ish) believe Princess Diana was killed
by the British establishment because she was about to marry Dodi al
Fayed - a Muslim.

Forty per cent!

The penny/pound Engineer Competence Index

There's a saying: an engineer can make for a penny what any fool can
make for a pound.

I'd put myself at about 47p.

So, all you engineers: How 'bout you?

Movement in Design

My brother has berated me for having a lack of twaddle on my blog. You'll be soorreeee.... but why should I write my own when there's so much fascinating twaddle being written by other people? Ben Hopson, for example, sets down some interesting thoughts on movement in design, which I have to agree is a long-neglected area. It's not enough that something should be well-designed from a static point of view; interaction is almost always dynamic, and the dynamics of an object are often neglected. How do we describe them? More importantly, how do we research them and develop them into a feature? Well, using video, Ben. Obviously. Duh. But it's still a neglected field, so good on you for thinking about it.


Haven't had time to check out the videos, but if they're as novel as his writing then I'm sure they're fascinating.

Movement in Design

My brother has berated me for having a lack of twaddle on my blog. You'll be soorreeee.... but why should I write my own when there's so much fascinating twaddle being written by other people? Ben Hopson, for example, sets down some interesting thoughts on movement in design, which I have to agree is a long-neglected area. It's not enough that something should be well-designed from a static point of view; interaction is almost always dynamic, and the dynamics of an object are often neglected. How do we describe them? More importantly, how do we research them and develop them into a feature? Well, using video, Ben. Obviously. Duh. But it's still a neglected field, so good on you for thinking about it.

Haven't had time to check out the videos, but if they're as novel as his writing then I'm sure they're fascinating.

My name is Matt and I'm a neophiliac

...and it's not my fault.

No, apparently, it's genetic. Wonderful.

(personally I suspect it's more to do with access, and the ease of, but if someone's willing to give me a medical cop-out, then hey, who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth? Especially when it's all new and shiny).

 

Edinburgh Fringe Shows I have seen

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Other

I know there are one or two locals who occasionally read this, so I guess it might be useful information for somebody.

So far:

Ermm...
(sorry, just collecting my thoughts. It wouldn't surprise me to learn there is a show with that name; I haven't seen it, though)

Working backwards:

NewsRevue 2006: *** Satire in song - okay, I thought. One neat trick with some beards, and some decent stuff (John Prescott as the Churchill insurance dog). Not as good as last year, though, apparently.

Puppetry of the Penis:** interesting trick, dire script - probably works very well with a drunken Friday night audience, but not so good with a sleepy Sunday night one. Recommend buying the book rather than seeing the show. And yes, this is exactly what you think it is. When they told me it was projected on a big screen, I thought they meant in silhouette. They didn't.

Free & Easy Comedy at The Stand: *** A free show with two pretty good comedians busily saving their good stuff for the paying punters later on. Still pretty good, though; I've paid to see worse.

Geraldine Quinn: ***** I really enjoyed this. Fantastic voice, great songs. And the most amazing gurning I've ever seen, by a girl.

Andrew Maxwell: **** Excellent stuff. Drunken, tokin' wisdom.

A British Guide to Religion: ** Bleh. Too much like being lectured to by a couple of (overly rehearsed) students to really engage me.


...not bad for two days. Thanks to Jen for staying with me for the weekend and introducing me to random people, who introduced me to other random people, etc., etc.

Some more:

Tim Minchin: **** another Aussie comic. Similar sort of sense of humour to Geraldine Quinn, I thought, but with TOO FEW SONGS. Came away feeling slightly cheated.

Act Without Words I & II *** A nice little cultural break to hours of unremitting, relentless observational comedy. The set is fantastic. There are no words. Literally.

One set to Love*** My god. A tsunami of a script which the actors surf with aplomb. Humour on so many levels that none of them quite penetrate, and your sense of disbelief comes away feeling like a puppy who's just spent the day being yanked around by a hyperactive three year old. Enjoyed it, but needed a drink afterwards.

Meedja

It occurred to me the other day that the what the media does is to scoop up the edges of society and fold them back into the middle.

Seen while shopping:

A young lady wearing the hajib stocks shelves with women's summer
clothes in John Lewis (big department store). What is she thinking as
she lays out those skimpy outfits that she can never wear? Does she
think about it at all? Or is it just as if she was stocking shelves
with any other product she wouldn't use, like books in Japanese or
men's shaving products?

Woolly crash hat using supercustard stuff

This I found ages ago while trawling for stuff for skiing.  It's a hat! 

I love skiing, but I'm reluctant to wear a crash helmet despite hearing numerous horror stories (and knowing people who've been injured). The ribcap is kind of a halfway house - way cooler than a crash hat, it uses some weird stuff called d3o which takes the whole harden-on-impact thing to new levels. I want one, and it'd be brilliant for persuading kids who are too cool to wear something which might afford them some protection.

All the shops appear to be in Switzerland, which is a long way to go for a hat, but never mind that now.

Auto cross posting test

This posted to blogger, 1.05pm (local time) Wednesday 2nd August.

Don't seem to be able to limit distribution, so I hope this doesn't get posted to all and sundry. Still, that's all part of the testing process I guess.

Spam Architecture

This has been floating round a few blogs recently, but it is very cool so I'm foisting it on you lot too.



Spam Architecture,
from Alex Dragulescu, is a computer program which takes junk email as
input and converts it into some rather wonderful 3D models. How it does
this, I dunno. There's probably a lot of Alex going into the mix, too.
Anyway, they look just fine.

Ebooks, libraries, authorship

Catching up with my technical reading, I come across this article in New Electronics about Ebooks (www.neon.co.uk, but don't bother going there, I couldn't find the article online; here's a BBC story about it). Despite its focus on the technical challenges in producing a readable electronic book (battery life, resolution, screen size and shape, etc.) its main conclusion seems to be that the principal challenge here is one of ergonomics: making a device which fits how people read.

Well, duh.

I think even this misses the point, though. I suspect, although I have no proof of this, that the way authors write is in part a reaction to the format their work will take. On the surface, this is fairly obvious; work written for a pamphlet or a newspaper will have a different tone and form from that written for book format, and there's a clear, overt design intention there. The question is, is there also a subconscious conformity to the format? I suspect there is. One indication might be the size and spacing of paragraphs, which not only break up the story but also ease the strain on the eye and make a page of writing less intimidating. Obviously the width of the page and the size of the writing will mean that paragraph shape will be different in different formats. Does a writer then write with a visual expectation of what the page will look like? Or are we just listening to the voices in our heads?

So it's interesting to speculate as to what the shape and design of these new ebooks will do to their content, if anything. Any effect will probably be lost amid all the other influences we take in, but I wonder. And it's not as if books will disappear overnight - in this era of TV on demand and easy broadband access to the Net of a Million Lies, the book industry is the biggest it's ever been. Will a new generation of authors, brought up reading from ebooks, produce content better suited to it than us old-fashioned book lovers?

Conversely, of course, this means that anyone designing an ebook has a fearsome challenge. I've read books on a pda, and the experience is less than satisfying. For my money, the design of an ebook is one of the most culturally charged and potentially difficult bits of design you're likely to come across. It's like designing a toilet; both strike deep into our cultural territory, and our sense of where and who we are.

(Incidentally, this is my first cross-post from my Blogger blog, Supernormal. I set it up so that I'd be able to post from my Clie when I'm not at home. Already annoyed with it though - upload of pictures doesn't seem to be possible. Guess I'm shelling out the fifty dollars and setting up my own now).

Ebooks, libraries, authorship

Catching up with my technical reading, I come across this article in New Electronics about Ebooks (www.neon.co.uk, but don't bother going there, I couldn't find the article online; here's a BBC story about it). Despite its focus on the technical challenges in producing a readable electronic book (battery life, resolution, screen size and shape, etc.) its main conclusion seems to be that the principal challenge here is one of ergonomics: making a device which fits how people read.

Well, duh.

I think even this misses the point, though. I suspect, although I have no proof of this, that the way authors write is in part a reaction to the format their work will take. On the surface, this is fairly obvious; work written for a pamphlet or a newspaper will have a different tone and form from that written for book format, and there's a clear, overt design intention there. The question is, is there also a subconscious conformity to the format? I suspect there is. One indication might be the size and spacing of paragraphs, which not only break up the story but also ease the strain on the eye and make a page of writing less intimidating. Obviously the width of the page and the size of the writing will mean that paragraph shape will be different in different formats. Does a writer then write with a visual expectation of what the page will look like? Or are we just listening to the voices in our heads?

So it's interesting to speculate as to what the shape and design of these new ebooks will do to their content, if anything. Any effect will probably be lost amid all the other influences we take in, but I wonder. And it's not as if books will disappear overnight - in this era of TV on demand and easy broadband access to the Net of a Million Lies, the book industry is the biggest it's ever been. Will a new generation of authors, brought up reading from ebooks, produce content better suited to it than us old-fashioned book lovers?

Conversely, of course, this means that anyone designing an ebook has a fearsome challenge. I've read books on a pda, and the experience is less than satisfying. For my money, the design of an ebook is one of the most culturally charged and potentially difficult bits of design you're likely to come across. It's like designing a toilet; both strike deep into our cultural territory, and our sense of where and who we are.

(Incidentally, this is my first cross-post from my Blogger blog, Supernormal. I set it up so that I'd be able to post from my Clie when I'm not at home. Already annoyed with it though - upload of pictures doesn't seem to be possible. Guess I'm shelling out the fifty dollars and setting up my own now).

Automating the design process

Just when you think your job will be the last to go, someone scares you with a bit of software like this...

Turd-polishing, or give-a-damn design?

The world's biggest bath - and its rubber duckies.

One of those phenomenonmeneonemenneona that doesn't yet have a shiny
website but desperately needs one, (there is one here
but it's rubbish),
this Radio 4 programme tells the story of 28,800 little rubber ducks,
turtles, beavers and frogs who were unceremoniously dumped
into the Pacific ocean when their container was swept overboard in
1992. Since then, they've travelled the ocean currents, giving joy to
men with beards (all beachcombers have beards, there's a law) and
enlightenment to oceanographers as they turn up in places they really
shouldn't have been able to drift to. Some, apparently, were frozen
into Arctic ice and ended up on the shores of Scotland (yay! Go
duckies).



This is your main man, dignified by the name Curtis Ebbesmeyer, with a
few of the fearless explorers who dropped out of the race early.
Apparently these plastic venturers are hot property; there's a $100
bounty if you find a genuine one, and they have been known to turn up
on ebay for gazillions of dollars (or some money, anyway, I don't know).

Home Automation update

I've been looking for a home automation system that will (a) be very
low power so I can justify it for just one light and turning the
wirless network on and off, and (b) can be controlled from my mobile
phone.



There are several very basic systems that satisfy (a); only just found
a system which satisfies (b), which is the Pluto home system.


Bad news: it requires an always-on Linux server, so is almost certainly more power hungry than the network;

Good news: if you don't want their hardware, you can get the software
for free, as an open source project! Hmmm... pretty sure I can scare up
a Linux server from somewhere...

For dentworth

Apologies for the execrable video - it was an old camera, it was dark (heavy gamma correction going on here)... but I thought it time to post something! Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce my little floor-sweeping robot, prototype 1.


At the moment it's rather better at rearranging dust than picking it up - I'd say it's about 50% efficient. It works like those street cleaners - basically a dustpan-and-brush on wheels. It's sensor array is a little crude at the moment, consisting of two bigass bump sensors at the front connected to a bigass 'sensing plate'. It has serious problems with obstacles that taper inwards at the bottom, and since I fitted the dustpan to the bottom it seems to be having a few traction issues, so I guess I need to raise it up a little.

If you look very very carefully on the last part of this clip, you can see a grey smudge on the floor which disappears when the robot goes over it. That's a big pile of dust that I carefully swept up and put in harm's way, so the robot could eat it. Or just throw it around. Whatever.

The trickiest criteria (apart from getting a sensor array which was doable with available components and fairly reliable) was making the whole thing low enough to fit under the sofa. Which it does, just.

Later additions: I wanna put some sort of edge following sensors on the side - got some limit switches and drinking straws for making little 'antenna' feelers. Also really need to smooth out the ride - as you can tell from the clip, it makes a horrendous noise at the moment. Can't be good. I need to somehow improve the ground clearance without losing any cleaning (or dirt-collecting) ability.

But it kinda works. Enough that, once you add in the entertainment value, it's worth running it.

Enormous thanks go to Debbie, who went back and forth to Radio Shack, bought it for me on spec, and packed and posted it! Got the book yet, Debs?

Obviously it needs a better name than 'protoype 1'. Suggestions, anyone?

Tourist remover

It's been too long since I looked at core77 - too many cool
things! This is worth sharing, though: a service for removing tourists
from your tourist photos. Apparently you have to provide several shots,
and the service (algorithm? Software sweat shop? Hope it's the former)
provides you with photos free of irritating people. Personally, I like
to have someone in my photos - otherwie they seem a little sterile to
me - but hey.





These
snow globes are more to my taste. Deliciously whimsical, and not a little dark ;) What
did I tell you? Cool stuff!

Alternative Multiply relationships

This is a conversation I've had with various people, but I can't find
where it's been discussed more generally. I did try searching Multiply
for "alternative relationships", but realized pretty quickly the
potential for misunderstanding there...



Anyway.



Instead of being an 'internet buddy', a 'colleague', or a 'father' (just one of many), what would you like to see where it says:



"Elephant_in_the_room205 is..."



...your pet's nemesis.

...your friendly sceptic.

...your secret shame.

...your idiot halfbrother who you keep in the attic.

...Mrs Norris.

...your own secret identity which you forgot about.

...your favourite meal reinterpreted as modern dance.

...your hero.

...a random hanger-on.



Any more suggestions? I'm sure we've done this, but
I can't find it anywhere. I'm also sure I came up with some really good
ones which are now tragically lost.



P.S. if there really is a user 'Elephant_in_the_room205', then I can only say, 'oops'....

Moom's cure for bashful bladder syndrome

This is rather personal, but as it's true and as it may one day provide relief for someone else I think it merits posting.



Bashful bladder syndrome, for those who haven't come across it, is the
name given to that experience many men have when they are desperate to
urinate, but when they finally get to a urinal find it difficult to do
the deed in front of others. Neal Stephenson described as being the
body's way of telling you that you need to "get off campus and go get a
fucking job", which rings strangely true, but doesn't really help.



My own cure is as follows: I stare at the bit of wall in front of me
and imagine that it is a landscape, and I picture myself in that
landscape. The grouting between tiles becomes a glacier valley, strewn
with ice and white pebbles; peeling paint becomes vast petrified waves
arcing up over my head.



The effort of imagining all this stuff means that my brain doesn't have
the capacity to exert its panicky grip on my bladder, which can then
gleefully get on with its own thing.

My wish list for home automation

Being an eco-aware gadget freak is a bit of a trial at times. When it
comes to electricity and power consumption, I have an eco-angel on one
shoulder telling me to cut down, and a gadget devil on the other which
just wants more more more! My bete noire at the moment is my wireless
network. This sits happily under the sofa in an always-on arrangement,
which is wonderfully handy for two reasons: first, it's always on, and
second, it uses up a couple of inaccessible power points (and the
position of the cable modem limits it a bit anyway). Unfortunately,
such profligacy gets my eco-angel wagging reproachful fingers.



The obvious answer (to a gadget freak) is a remote control power point.
These are relatively cheap and come with a remote, so I could turn the
whole caboodle off at the mains without having to crawl around under
the sofa. But it's another remote, which is, well,
just dull.



The thing is, if it were just the network then I could probably live
with it. But I have another little domestic bete noire which I'd like
to be able to fix. The stairwell outside my door is very dark, and
although I have an external light, the switch for it is inside the
flat, which isn't very handy when you're fumbling with your keys in the
pitch black corridor. So, I'd like to be able to turn this light on
from outside. Again, a remote would be handy, but I'm not about to take
a remote with me when I have a bluetooth enabled
mobile phone and a PDA which does bluetooth and wifi!



So. First off, the whole point is to save electricity, so an always-on
PC home automation system is ludicrous. What I want is this:

1. Turn on my outside light at a command from my phone (or PDA);


2. Turn on my wireless network (which can be done just by turning it on at the mains) via a similar signal.


3. To have the ability to turn off mains AC sockets. My life seems
   to run on batteries, which is great except for the chargers that I
   absentmindedly leave plugged in when they're not charging anything!
   Turning these off without bending down would be a boon.

That's it. Doesn't seem like an outrageous list to me. But can I find
anything which will do it? No. Home automation systems seem to assume
that it's okay to lug another remote around with you, which just
irritates me when I have two devices perfectly capable of performing
this function.

District B13

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

I have to admit, the action movie genre isn't one I'd automatically associate with French cinema, but there are few names to conjure with like that of Luc Besson , famous for (among others) Leon and the Fifth Element, and the scriptwriter of this little knees-up. Banlieue 13 is a low(ish) budget action movie - think Escape from New York, transplanted to Paris in 2010. The plot is pretty flimsy - a neutron bomb somehow finds its way into the hands of a local warlord, and a police ninja has to team up with a local hero to get it back. Cue carnage. What made this film special for me was the superb action sequences, which are heavily influenced by freerunning (I think the French call it Parkour). If you 've never heard of freerunning, it's simply the most amazing and graceful modern sport ever invented, and it was created by (you've guessed it) the French (here's the wikipedia article). The stunts these slim, dancer-like guys pull off (and the actors did all their own stuff, apparently) make the top-heavy heroes of Hollywood and their ludicrously better-than-life special effects look frankly tired.

There's also some nearly-intellectual dialogue which simply wouldn't have made it into a Superman movie - and if there are some glaring holes in the plot, then hey - it's an action film! So what? An excellent night out.

Another boring medical update

For the sake of completeness, more than anything: Had another meeting
with my consultant yesterday (God bless the NHS). His theory is that
I'm still feeling run-down because of the Azathioprine. Apparently,
'flu-like symptoms', as well as being meningitis, depression, flu,
incipient alcoholism, flu, and pretty much anything else you can name,
are also a common side-effect of the Az. Personally, I hadn't made the
connection with 'flu-like' - I'd just figured I felt run down and a bit
woozy, although I guess I was getting the occasional hot flush thing as
well. Anyway, I'm not taking the Az for a few days to see what happens.
Apparently there's an alternative pill which can avoid this problem, so
we'll see what happens.



In the meantime, it sounds like I'll be off work for another week. That should be great but is actually very boring.

League of Gentlemen/2001 crossover?

Where am I going to get a wav file of Papa Lazarou saying "I can't let you do that Dave" ...

(I fear X have dunked the audio on this in their conversion process. Note to self: must learn how to create Flash videos to avoid nasty automated conversion).

Please release me...

It's been nearly a fortnight since my last blog entry, and there's a
good reason for the break (I'd hate to keep my many readers on
tenterhooks for no reason, ha ha). The day after I wrote my last entry,
I phoned my hospital consultant for some advice on my worsening
condition. His response was to get me into hospital at once. Not a
moment too soon, either - I arrived with a raging temperature (39.5
degrees C, which is...let's see...103 Fahrenheit), and by the time I
was bedded down on a ward I was pretty incoherent. Turns out it was
option (b) - a roaring reaction from the colitis to being let off the
leash with neither anti-inflammatories nor immune suppressants (nor
steroids) to calm it down. Not a little scary. I spent five days on an
steroid drip, having methyl prednisolone pumped into me.



All this, I should add, on the eve of the holiday I was supposed to be
taking with my parents on their brand spanking new yacht in southern
France. Mum, bless her heart, flew up from the family seat in Devon and
has been a lifeline - it would have been truly miserable here without
her. She's been cooking and cleaning and generally tidying my flat, and
sleeping on the sofa. Dad was already on the boat, so he's been stuck
in France, bored to tears (no crew = no fun sailing), and we've had
daily text messaging and phone calls. The rest of the family have all
given their best wishes, although it's hard when we're so scattered
about the country.



But anyway.



It's funny, but there seems to be this assumption that as soon as
you're out of hospital, you're fixed and fine and ready to go again.
Well, I'm not. I'm still on humungous doses of steroids, and I will be
for weeks to come. Doctor's orders are to take another week off, and
then ease back into work slowly. And at the moment, I'm definitely
feeling the effects of over-exertion, even now. But I feel like I'm on
the mend, and my poo is wonderfully, satisfyingly solid. You have no
idea how good that feels. I can only hope that it stays that way when
the steroids drop away and the Azathioprine takes up the slack...

Hazel is on Mastermind!

Start:	Jul 17, '06 9:00p
Location:	The telly. BBC2

Stuck in bed again

Well, once again it's official. I'm ill. Stuck in bed for the last two
days, with just about enough energy to make myself soup. All the usual
- dizziness, the usual digestive rebellion, etc. And earlier on today,
I get a phone call from the doctors' surgery saying that they want me
to come in because they've had my blood test results back, and the
latests set have an unusually high ESR.



A high ESR suggests that there's a lot of protein bonded to my red
blood cells, which in turn (don't ask me how) indicates an increase in
inflammation. Which means, as if I hadn't noticed (hah), that my gut is
going ballistic. Again.



Don't know what they'll say on Thursday, when I see the doctor, but
there's basically two possiblities, and I reckon they'll have about as
much of a clue as I do. Either (a) this is a bad (and fairly sudden)
reaction to the Azathioprine (please no - I'd like something to work,
please), or (b) I'm falling between two stools - the Az isn't supposed
to kick in for three months or so, and I'm not taking any other
medication, so hopefully the mice are playing while the cat's away, in
a manner of speaking.



On the plus side, I'm watching the Space Shuttle launch. From about T
minus four hours. Which is kinda interesting - we're now a T minus one
hour, and the astronauts are all safely tucked up in their overblown
space truck. Hope none of them need to poo. IBS would be a hell of a
thing in free fall... my God. that's a scary thought. Lends a whole new
meaning to the phrase 'explosive decompression', hah. Meanwhile, I can
only watch in envy. To me, the space programme is just the sort of
greater cause that I'd like to be able to devote myself to -  so
watching all these guys has something of a religious feel. I'm probably
too old and broken down now - but it was something which has stayed
with me since college - the conviction that it's important in life to
know that your effort has been devoted to something you really believe
in.

Pictures of fish?

Well, pictures of fishing, anyway. Design*sponge today had an article about Corey Arnold, this guy who's a fisherman in Alaska and also a freelance photographer. His portfolio is online here - check out the Bering Sea Crabbing folio. Amazing. What a way to make a living.

A scary true story: man hears voices

A friend of mine told me this story. It comes from a Young Offender's
Institute, where she does some voluntary work. One of the inmates (I'm
sure they have a more PC word for them, but I'm going to call them
inmates), a fourteen-year-old boy, came to his mentor in some distress.
"I'm hearing voices in my head!" he complained. Cue panic: a mental
health nurse is drafted in, and they set up an interview with this kid.
Let's call him Sam (I don't know his real name.)



"Sam, tell us about these voices. When did they start?"

"Well, it was the uvver night, I was listnin to these two blokes
chattin', and this voice in my head said, like, 'that bloke's a
tosser'. An' ever since, I can't get away. I'll be, like, sitting in my
cell on me own, and it'll be, like, there. All da
fcukin' time."

"And what does it say?"

"Jus' like, stuff. About me. About wha'ever."

"Does this voice tell you to do things?"

"Nah, like, it's just dissin' people and goin' on, innit."



... so after a bit more of this, the nurse comes to a conclusion:

"Sam, we think we know what the voice is. You don't need to worry about
it - this voice is you. It's called
thinking. We all have it. Doctors call it your inner
monologue, or inner narrative." (or something... I made that bit up.)



Seriously. This child, aged fourteen, had never heard his own thoughts
before. He was scared, really scared, of his own inner narrative. The
idea of an internal monologue, such as the one which is reading this
back to me, was totally alien to him. How scary is
that?



(Apologies for my poor attempt at a teen accent).

IWOOT(x): Design without losing your soul

It's a book: 

Azathioprine

Well, it's been kind of an up-and-down month or so health-wise. After the debacle of the drugs test,
I had a couple of great weeks on prednisolone... but you can't stay on
steroids forever, and as soon as I came off the drugs I was back to
square one - not passing anything solid, feeling run down, stomach
pain... not fun.



So last week I had my latest appointment with my consultant, and now I'm on Athazioprine, which is strong magic indeed. (see here for
a bit about how it's used in ulcerative colitis) It's an
immunosuppressant, so it's damping down my immune system's responses
generally which is kind of alarming (what happens if I catch something
else while I'm on it?!), but I'm assured that in cases like mine it's
pretty good. And little sis is on something similar for her arthritis,
so I'm hopeful that there won't be any problems. Nonetheless, I still
have to go in for blood tests every week for a bit, until everybody's
happy that there are no serious side-effects.



The main downer about this new voodoo is that it takes up to 3 months
to actually start working. In the meantime, I'm not allowed to take my
balsalazine (anti-inflammatories), nor any steroids (already had three
courses in the last six months), so I'm feeling pretty dreadful -
tired, occasional stomach pains, and diarrhoea. And (I think it's
because I'm getting dehydrated from all the liquid going out the other
end) I'm getting quite a bit of cramp if I even get slightly cold. It's
all very depressing, and I feel like I'm really not much fun at all.
Went to a party last night, but really didn't feel particularly
sparkling - "so what do you do for hobbies?" "Not a lot, at the
moment." ... all a bit of a bummer, really.



Got to look to the future, that's all. Hopefully the Az will have kicked in in time for the festival in August...

Accelerando

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy
Author:	Charles Stross

It's not often that I know the exact date when a book will be published in paperback, but with Accelerando, I had a good excuse. I'd bought it already. And had it SNATCHED FROM ME at Geneva AIRPORT, after I'd spent an entertaining hour on a plane, chortling over how good the first three chapters were.

So when I finally got my hands on another copy, it had a lot to live up to. This is Charles Stross' third novel; Singularity Sky was a fantastic debut, with one of the most entertaining and novel descriptions of space warfare ever (as well as all sorts of other weirdness). Iron Sunrise, his second, was spoiled a little for me because it seemed to threaten to become a cheesy series. But this is Accelerando, and it's fantastic, just amazingly brilliant. It pushed pretty much all my buttons - it had bafflingly incomprehensible aliens, barely comprehensible technology, dialogue snappier than the West Wing on speed, and a sarcastic cat. What more could anyone want?

Stross' ambition only becomes clear as the story unfolds - nothing less than a family saga and history of humanity, a bastard lovechild of Catherine Cookson and Brian Aldiss. Part of that little group of exciting Scottish sf writers, whose ranks include Iain Banks and Ken McLeod, Stross' style is sharp and snappy, and I absolutely adore his descriptions of technology going far too fast for people to follow.

I do think his characters would benefit from a bit more depth, though - perhaps some of the inexplicability applied to the aliens and the AI might have been better applied to the people - and to be honest I found the ending something of an anti-climax; it's hard to chronicle such a vast span and still end on something more dramatic, without it becoming a cliffhanger. So I forgive him for ending with a lack of 'bang'. But there's plenty of 'gosh-wow' moments here, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone who likes to lose themselves in a fast-moving, fast-talking vision of a World Gone Mad.

Caption me?: World Cup carton

There's something not quite right about this. I can seewhat they were
trying to do, but to me, it just says "Happy Cows during a Bank Raid"

Cows are a serious business...

Edinburgh has been hosting an art 'installation' for the last few months. Every so often you'll turn a corner and be confronted with a brightly painted cow. There's quite a lot of them, but here's just one or two that I happened to pass when I had my phone in my hand...

Another eco-rant: Calculate the size of your footprint

...presumably the same size as your foot...



Seagoon: Let me see that boot! (sotto voce) Hmmm, size nineteen. (aloud) What size head have you got?

Eccles: Size nineteen.



I was bored at work today, so I devoted some time to finding ecological
footprint calculators on the web. I knew these things existed, but for
some strange reason it'd never occurred to me that they'd be on the
internet - although of course, they're perfect web fodder.



So anyway. I found a few, the best of which were probably the Mountain Equipment Cooperative one (yeah, I know), and the Earthday Network one. The general gist of it was that if everyone lived like me then we'd need about 4 planets to keep us all going.



I had time, so I did about four different ones, and the results varied
a bit. The MEC one did put me off when it came out with statements like
" The average living space for a North American household is around 200m² in your area" (in my area?), so I plumped for the Earthday one in the end.



Cut to the chase: my ecological footprint is 4.9 hectares.

Good news: the UK average is 5.3 (phew)

Bad news: the sustainability target - an equitable figure based on everybody using the same - is 1.8 hectares.

Good news: The Earthday calc has another calculator to help you work
out what the most effective steps you could take to become more
ecofriendly are.

Bad news: the best thing I can do for the planet is become vegetarian.



The thing which most startled me was the contribution that my food (all
flown in specially from New Zealand, obviously) makes to my footprint.
I was genuinely startled about that.



Anyway, go see what your footprint is.

Write your own job advert

Wanted: one CAD monkey. Must have infinite patience with dead-slug-in-a-straw slow computer links, and own supply of bananas. Ability to keep self amused during slow periods crucial. Ability to not mind too much when people at head office ignore your life's work and produce something dumb instead without so much as bothering to inform you, also helpful. Must be able to go for days without speaking to another living soul.

Benefits:

1. nobody really caring that you're using company resources and personnel to make light switch surrounds for your flat.
2. The ability to go bang things with hammers when stuff gets too frustrating.
3. Many many toys (lathes, chemi-etching, rapid prototyping machines, etc.) which can be pressed into service for various, er, personal projects. (see 1)
   

If you had to write an advert for your own job, what would it look like?

We think we're so clever (1): Everest clothing

Modern technology? Bah. Climbers have just returned from testing replicas of the original clothing worn by Mallory and Tenzing on the first Everest expedition, and found them lighter than the modern stuff.

They say the kit was very warm, and apparently pleasant to wear for long periods. What they don't specifically say is whether it was as warm as the modern kit. Also, I suspect that the fact that they were tailored to fit, rather than off-the-shelf makes a significant difference.

On the whole, though, a triumph for the Wisdom of the Ancients. And very dapper.

Design/students: Lil Jonsson

(Via Treehugger):

Besides having an adorable (if extremely minimalist) website, some of her designs aren't that bad either, in a studenty kind of way (oodles of creativity, no time, no money, and no need to be practical = simple, daft, and adorable). I loved wd40, a musical hinge which greets you every time you open the door. I reckon it would be utterly charming for maybe the first two days or so, then drive you to demented rage within a week. But it's cute.

Cutting a bit close to the bone - in a very funny way...

On Sunday I was having lunch with some friends I don't see very often,
when the subject got round to clever songs (via Flanders and Swann's
The Reluctant Cannibal, if you must know). And Archie leans over to me
and says, "there's these two doctors..."



Hello, I thought, this sounds familiar...



"..doing the most outrageous songs! They're brilliant! I'll show you their website when we get back."

"One of them wouldn't be called Adam, would he..." I said slowly. And
yes, indeed: it turns out I know these two. I did a couple of choir
tours with them when I was a student, and I can vouch for their
brilliance and musical ability. Listening to their songs now, though,
it's probably worth pointing out a couple of things: Adam is a shocking
misogynist (or I thought so, anyway), and they.. well, they don't hold
back with the lyrics. But they are brilliantly funny. They were up in
Edinburgh for the festival last year, and I only didn't see it because
I lost the venue. (I had a ticket and everything).



Check out their website - the Londoners amongst you will definitely, definitely enjoy the Underground Song...

Eco-stuff: Stunning news flash (not)

Well, I was going to spew righteous venom about Guantanamo Bay, but Hazel's beaten me to it today. So instead, he's an eco-newsflash from the Treehugger blog - wash your clothes less.

Not entirely surprising - but it does contain one valuable nugget - the washing, drying and ironing (?) of jeans constitutes 47% of the total environmental impact. Apparently. Including the transportation, which I was a little surprised at.

Sleep

Start:

Jun 8, '06 6:00p

Sculpture: unnamed man with laptop.

I want one of these (5) - DIY radio

Less is more, right? Right? But... how little can you get away with? This design from wouter Geense design studio explores that territory - it's a radio which comes in a basically unfinished state, and you can use whatever you want as an aerial, buttons, etc. - even down to drilling your own arrangement of holes for the speaker (spell out your name? Why not?). I think it looks deliciously idiosyncratic, and cool, and I want one. But at a deeper level, it seems to me to pose an interesting question. When my Dad was a kid, his radio was a mass of wires on a bit of board, with a crystal and an earpiece. It was totally do-it-yourself. This one has taken that to a different level, but is it less designed than a 'proper' shop one?

Ach, who cares.

Eco-abomination - the disposable electric toothbrush

I had my parents come up at the weekend. This may not seem such a big
deal, but it's an eight hour drive for them, and they were bringing me
furniture, so it was a big deal. But that's not what I wanted to talk
about.



What I wanted to talk about was this: My Mum, who's a dentist, showed
me a free sample she'd been sent recently, of an electric toothbrush. A
disposable electric toothbrush. I mean, completely disposable. There
was no way of charging the battery, and no way of replacing it. Is it
only me whose blood boils at this sort of profligacy? The life of the
blasted thing is governed by one thing only - the power in the battery.
If you made the battery replaceable, you could increase the life of the
thing dramatically - but no, some evil company wanted to sell as many
of the cursed things as they could, so they sealed it up. What's more,
since it's a sealed unit it'd be extremely difficult (probably
impossible) to recycle - if anyone would bother. That is genuinely
EVIL. There is NO EXCUSE for that sort of waste. In my shower, I have a
razor which is a similar size and shape, and has a replaceable battery
in - so there are no problems with the dampness of the environment, or
sealing the thing. There is literally no excuse, and it poos all over everything I hold to be important about design.



Unfortunately, I can't find any links to the thing, and I can't
remember what make it was. It was a reputable tooth-stuff manufacturer,
I remember that much - Colgate, or Oral-B, or someone. It was someone,
in short, who should know better. It's bad design, and it's positively
disgusting.



Your sincerely,

Disgusted of Edinburgh.

Picture card society

I must admit, I'm slightly obsessive when it comes to greetings cards. I always make my own Christmas cards, and I'm eternally on the lookout for something slightly different and memorable when it comes to sending people things. So when I came across this card society  on design*sponge, I immediately saw the appeal. Subscribe for a month, 3 months, 6 months, etc., and every month they send out unique (and very nice) cards which can't be found anywhere else. I love the clean designs, and I don't send that many cards so it'd be perfect. In fact, I'd subscribe now - if it wasn't so freakin' expensive.

My flat, again. Just can't not tinker...

The table is now a much more realistic glass; the speed is slower. Other than that, much the same as the last one really. Still not happy with the focal length on the camera - objects may appear larger than they really are!

The leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army is called...

Minni Minnawi



(doo doooo doo doo doo)



Minni Minnawi



(doo doo doo doo)



Minni Minnawi



(doo doooo doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo dooo dooo doo doo dodo doo.)



...I know I shouldn't make fun of such a tragic situation, but I heard
his name on the radio this morning and I just couldn't help myself.

My flat. Virtually

As I may have mentioned (really?) I've just become a homeowner for the first time. This virtual model is a little project I started off before I'd moved in, to check out how the sofa would fit, work out whether I really wanted to change the lighting in the hall, etc. Now I've moved in, I guess it may still come in useful. Maybe.

It's not exactly TV quality video, and it'll flash by awful quick - sorry about that. But if I fiddle with it any more I'll never post it, and I have more important things to do (like clean the damn place), so consider this a first draft which I'll fix up eventually. Of course, the real view out the window is nowhere near as nice... but hey, in this version, I can make the view exactly what I damn well please. So I made it nice.

The actual model is very basic - I scanned in the floor plan and extruded it. Dead easy. The thing that takes the time is getting the lighting right.

Pictoplasma!

In the absence of any exciting projects of my own to share (I have several which I want to post, but they're not ready yet), core77 brought me this blast from the past. I came across pictoplasma in book form a few years back and loved it, but here's the website! It's a directory of 6500 character graphics and they are universally very very cool. Check out the archive. Great place for inspiration.

On the aesthetics of wind farms

Interesting article over at Design Observer (via core 77) about the aesthetics of wind farms. The author makes a couple of interesting points about one of the main arguments over wind farms, which is the question of whether they're ugly or not. Personally, I think they're rather beautiful, and eventually he comes out with that opinion too, but on the way he makes some interesting points about how our perceptions of beauty are to do with our perception of order, and the orderliness of natural vs man-made systems. Ugliness, apparently, is fragmentation - who knew? Glad we got that sorted out.

I do disagree with him on a couple of things:

1. It isn't our politico-economic system which doesn't place any value on nature, it's our economic one. That might seem like a fine distinction, but I think it's an important one. Politicians will value anything if enough opinion polls tell them to.
   
2. I think his list of natural 'principles' is a basically a list of platitudes. Nature doesn't 'design', and it certainly doesn't have 'principles'. We can make observations about it, sure, but still, I don't know what "Nature exploits the power of limits" means.

One thing he does mention which rang true, though, was when he said that modernists were crypto-materialists (wow, long words). I have to say that rang true to me. I love the modernist aesthetics, and I have to admit to being pretty darn materialist. In fact, I have great difficulty relating to people who claim to be 'spiritual' - I tend to just ignore that side of things. This may explain at least one disastrous relationship. But to get back to the point... on the other hand, I think there's an underlying principle which Justin is ignoring, in that both nature and modernist design use the repetition of simple units to create a larger effect (as per this rather effective image I found). I think there's more homage to nature in modernism than he'd care to admit.

Anyway. Any thoughts? How do you lot feel about wind farms? Elegant, or hideous? Would you have one in your back garden?

I want one of these (4) - Zenkaya prefab

Somewhere between the so-called 'static caravan' and a fully-fledged house comes this beauty from Zenkaya, a South African firm. Not sure if it'd stand up to British weather (or even if they'll deliver that far), but really, wow.

I want one of these (3) - light switch surround

It's kind of premature, but I'm worrying that my new flat - which I'm basically furnishing from scratch - is going to end up a bit soulless and drop-in-bachelor-IKEA-ish (if that makes any sense).  This young lady has come up with just the sort of thing I'd never have thought of, but which I soooo want now I've seen it... How gorgeous is that?

 

via design*sponge - which also has something VERY exciting - Andy Lang, a guy I went to college with, has commercialised one of the designs he did as a student and took it to icff this year! Fantastic to see his grinning face, and the cycloc is a brilliant design - in fact, I was thinking just the other day I could do with one of these in my flat right now! He deserves all the success he can get, and it's good to see him out there.

 

Bird in the vent

I've only been in my new flat a week, and a bird has managed to drop
into one of the wall spaces. I panicked a bit at first, thinking I had
a really impressive rat infestation, but rats don't make slapping,
flapping noises. Now I can hear it scrabbling pathetically against the
plastic grille on my wall vent. There's no way of getting to it from
outside (I mean it - it's a blank wall), and no way of getting the
grille off without destroying the vent (no visible screw holes or
anything, and nowhere to conveniently insert a Stanley knife).



The stupid thing is clearly injured and will die whatever.



Wot the blazes do I do? Let it die where it is, and hope it doesn't
smell too bad? Or do I make a mess of the wall in order to free it, so
it can die in the garden? It can't be that big - from the sound of it,
I'd guess it's a grownup starling or tit or somesuch. At the moment,
all I've done is cover up the vent so no light can get in, which seems
to have calmed it a bit. But it's been there at least a day now.



So in the meantime, it just scrabbles around at the bottom of a dark
hole waiting for death, like some ghastly metaphor for something.

My career as a guinea pig - fin

This is a little out of date - I wrote it a couple of weeks ago but
I've been moving house, so I never got round to posting it. It
completes a little cycle of blog entries, though, so I'm sticking it up
now.



Well, so much for that. It is with.. Well, with mixed feelings,
frankly, that I can announce the end of my career as a medical guinea
pig. It lasted a month, less two days.



On the one hand, I regret not
completing the course. I don't like to fail at things, and dropping out
of a three month course after one month feels like failure. It feels
like I let people down. I know how silly it is to feel that way, and I
know that even a negative result is still aa result, but... it's just
the way I'm wired, okay? I tried to stick with it as long as I could, I
tried to help... and I had to drop out.



On the other hand, I AM OFF THE
CRAPPY USELESS PILLS - WOOHOO! Thank crikey for that. Now,
hopefully, I can get back onto something proven which works.
This last month has been the crappiest of a series of crappy months
where I've had NO ENERGY and NO FUN. This has to be good timing,
given that I'm supposed to be moving house this week (well, moving from
one house-sitting to the next) and going away at the weekend too,
and I really didn't know how I was going to survive.



Let me just explain just how bad I've
been. I would have second thoughts about climbing a staircase two steps
at a time. This time last year, I was away surfing at the
weekend; this year, I don't think I'd be able to carry the board down
to the beach. This weekend, I managed to pack half a carload of boxes
and get them into storage - and that was me finished for the weekend,
completely wiped out. I had to rest up all that day and all the next,
just to recover. Now, hopefully, I can really start on the long road
back to some sort of sensible level of activity. It's been a long time.





Anyway - I am now moved into my new flat (more on that some other
time), and have been taking bog standard Prednisolone for three weeks -
and I feel wonderful. Last week, I managed to fit in a game of
five-a-side football in my lunch hour! That would have been totally
inconceivable three weeks ago. Glorious health!

I want one of these (2): Solar lamp

Gorgeous solar lamp with the solar panels incorporated into the design! That's something special.

I wasn't going to bother sharing this, but dammit, everyone needs a bit of extra elegance in their lives.

Gradisil

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy
Author:	Adam Roberts

First off, let's be clear - Adam Roberts writes high-concept sf, so most of you can go back to you daily lives now - sorry! In the past, he's written about a universe where it was possible to fly to the moon in a biplane, and a world where gravity operates at ninety degrees... Gradisil is a story of do-it-yourself homesteaders living in tin cans in Low Earth Orbit, struggling to remain free of the bickering nations of the Earth beneath them. His style is meditative, with sparse dialogue (no scriptwriters in these people's lives). His characters are deeply flawed, and very human. His scientific conceits are sometimes pretty far-out and sometimes fascinatingly practical, but I think there's a deeper level where the relationship between his characters and their surroundings rings true. And I love it.

What's sad is that Adam will always be a niche author, because he embodies all the qualities which people assume science fiction doesn't have - fully developed characters, human-centred bittersweet stories, a deliciously innovative literary style - while still building his stories around crazy scientific and technological ideas. The best comparison I can make is with Stanislaw Lem, who died a few weeks back (very sad) - some of you might have come across 'Solaris'. If you haven't... it's the sort of style you might get if Kafka and Solzhenitsyn ganged up on Isaac Asimov, stole his wallet and headed for Vegas. That's my best attempt.

What makes Adam stand apart for me, though, is his characters. They're not the emotionless, super-rational cardboard cutouts that often crop up in the genre. They are always deeply human: they're emotional and passionate, often giving to uttering non-sequiturs, or doing stupid things and not regretting them until much later. They're making their way as best they can, in a world where baffling, unfair, Kafka-esque things happen to them. And the worlds in which they live are both the same as ours, but different - physically, they might be completely different (flying to the moon in a biplane?), but on a human level, they're still populated by people making selfish, stupid, emotional, deeply familiar decisions.

I don't know how Adam approaches his work; I've never read any interviews, or seen anything about him. But one theme I see coming out of his books is the idea of our relationship with technology being difficult, almost abusive - technology mindlessly making things more complicated while we struggle to live our lives in a way we can still understand. It's not about consumerism, or corporate evil. It's not about any sort of conscious will at all. It's just about how we get ourselves into a mess, and then have to live with it. And whereas with most books things can be neatly squared away at the end, Adam's stories never seem to fit into our neat, shrink-wrapped preconceptions. That, for me, is his greatest skill and his great triumph.

I'm still only halfway through reading this. I know the ending will be sad, or at best bittersweet - that's Adam's style. But it'll be great: I am utterly, totally confident that he won't let me down. Two things I am sure of; I'll be ambushed by weirdness a few more times before the end of the book; and I will feel these characters for every moment of it. I can't wait

Something for all you label-pickers

Okay, so this isn't physically possible as shown, which is a shame, but
I've got a soft spot for these little design... is there a word for
it?... these cute little observational comedy pieces which designers
occasionally come up with.
This one is for anyone who's ever peeled a label off a
bottle of beer...





Dammit, there should be a word for these.I'm thinking of these little
pseudo-products that may or may not work, but which are really more
about observing our foibles and reflecting them back to us. The two
examples I've come across recently are this one (obviously), and the
hand-hold dog lead...



... some cute word, kinda flowery but with bite.

Tinytine.

Blossitack.

Flosstomy.

Kittcrack. (ew)

... actually, I kinda like that. Kittcrack. Kittcrack. Gotta ring to
it. 'Check out this latest bit of Kittcrack'.. hmm. Doesn't convey the
observation aspect?



Like the idea of using the word 'tine' in there (it's the pointy bit of your fork, okay?)

Designtine. Destine. Intrestine. Trestine. Destign.

Designspot. Despot. Spogit. Splogit

Barbie (hey, it has the word 'barb' in it already, what''s not to like?)

Barbirism.



oh heck, I dunno. Maybe I should just call them art, and be done with it.

I bought some Lego

I'm a bad person. I did a bad, bad thing.



I bought me some Lego.



(heeheehee)



I marched into ToysRUs, wandered up and down the place for a bit,
pretending to be interested in the Batman action figures (pah) before
returning to the shelves, grabbing a couple of the (bigger) boxes, and
marching out. (there was a paying bit, but that's boring so I'm not
mentioning it).



There is method in my madness, however. I have as a little pet project
the intention of making a solar-powered sweeping robot to clean the
(wooden) floors in my new flat (which I move into in two weeks). And I
shall make it out of Lego. But the lego robot unit I want to use
doesn't come out until mid-September (I'm waiting for the new one), so
I figured a radio control version would be a good halfway-house - I can
do the prototyping work on it, then build in the robot bit later.
Granted, a radio-controlled floor-sweeper won't make the job any less
time-consuming, but I figure it'll be kinda fun to zoom it round the
house from the comfort of my sofa (which I don't yet own).



Lego sure has come a long way in the last..er... fifteen years. I'm not
sure I approve wholeheartedly... but I was once again struck by just
how sublimely flexible the whole system is. And I was doubly struck by
the extreme cleverness of the people who put together these kits. All
of a sudden, some apparently-random components (which elsewhere in the
design are used for mechanical transmission, or bridging a gap)
suddenly coalesce into a pretty good-looking engine grille!



But I am feeling a leettle bit thwarted. The radio controlled car comes from a series called
'Racers', which is clearly designed to be rather meatier than the
normal stuff, and is only just barely compatible
with the regular bits. In fact, the regular Lego Technic dumper truck I
also bought looks rather tiny and pathetic next to this brute. And then
there's the tiny problem that the radio-controlled car goes about
twenty times as fast as I want my floor-sweeper to go... and
all the gearing and steering bits for the RC car are inside a
sealed unit! This is Lego built for brutality, and not for
flexibility. I disapprove. I'll just have to take it into work and open
up the sealed unit, that's all. Irritating, though.



Nonetheless - Lego! Mine! Fun! And total guilt, of course. I mean, a thirty-year-old man, playing with Lego...



On unrelated topics, the TV in my flat has died. This is very annoying,
as it's not mine, and the owner is in India and comes back in two
weeks. I'm mildly annoyed at the idea of living without TV for that
time, but what am I supposed to do? I could try and get it fixed, I
suppose - but she might want to buy a new one, and anyway, I'm
reluctant to spend my money on something which was clearly on its way
out (it's been playing up for a while).



No, you're right, I should try and get it fixed. Damn. How annoying.



And... I'm still ill. Damn these useless freakin'
drugs, they're hopeless. Look - on Sunday I got up late, I went to
ToysRUs on the aforementioned mission, I went for a bit of a drive
around for an hour or so, then I came home. I felt tired and went to
bed - at SEVEN. And I stayed there 'til NINE this morning. That is
all it took to completely exhaust me. That's not
good at all. This is one reason why I went out and bought this stupid
stuff - to make me feel a bit better about feeling tired all the time.
This really sucks.