NanoWriMo revisited: About the Bantolith

Back in November, when I was writing Government Joe must Die,
one of the parts which caused me most frustration was the little
episode on the Bantolith. I wanted the Bantolith to not speak, yet
still run his little domain with perfect ease, using nonverbal cues to
communicate his orders and wishes to the people on the station. The
descriptions I used left me deeply unsatisfied - his communications, by
opening doors, shining lifts, discouragingly cold blasts of air, seemed
very crude. But I couldn't quite put my finger on why, or how I could
do it better. Tonight I was suddenly struck with why this was such a
difficult problem. I wanted the Bantolith to manoeuvre people by
non-verbal methods, by misdirection and subliminal cues, by appealing
to them at a basically subconscious level. That's a difficult thing to
write about in a book, especially when you favour dialogue over
description. Essentially what you're writing is, almost by definition,
of the conscious rather than the subconscious. I wanted the Bantolith
to use the sort of tricks that that guy Derren Brown used on TV, the
sort of pseudo-magic which we don't even notice, where cues are fed to
us in the background, only to impel us at some later point, in what
appears to be a free-willed action. That's a tricky thing to write
about - how do you talk about the was the Bantolith operates, when the
cues happen a long way back from the actions, and they're things you
probably - no, not probably, absolutely definitely - did not notice in the first place? They are fundamentally disjointed. That's really gonna screw up your narrative.



I guess the only way to cope is by post-hoc explanation, but I really, really hate doing that.



I'm starting to understand, too, how much potential richness there
could be in that little caricature of a universe I dreamt up. Titan in
particular could easily have a gothic richness to it - ancient,
powerful, immensely wealthy, the fat spider loitering at the edges of
the web of Saturnine moons. There's a lot of potential there for
digging into some rich seams of history, as well as money and power.
And the cold, closed asceticism of the Triumvirates, rich in their own
way but always overshadowed by the golden disc of Titan. The
Triumvirates could be very interesting, socially. Socio-politically.

Main Page - Fab @ Home

http://www.fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
Make your own rapid prototyping machine. Who wouldn't want to? Fantastic. This can be yours for about $2300, supposedly. Definitely want one.

Nokia's Design Research for Everyone

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar2007/id20070314_689707.htm
Interview with Jan somebody or other from Nokia. Interesting comments about how they go about their research, but the most interesting part (I thought) was how prepay mobile phones are being used in the Third World as ATMs...

Pedal powered rollercoaster

http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/motional_rollercoaster_5722.asp


...in Japan, of course (where even the trains have cute little ears).

Work have blocked treehugger as being an 'advocacy group'. Grrr.

My first political cartoon

If only I'd looked at some photos and discovered he had a moustache and no beard. Hey ho. Like I said, haven't got time for perfection.

I'm trying not to aim for perfection, because if I do then I'll never get anything done.


This is my response to Khaled Sheikh Mohammed admitting he's guilty of everything.

Open Architecture Network

http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/
Still only a baby network really, mostly stuff that is already covered in the book Design like you give a Damn', but has the potential to be really, really interesting, I think.


via core77 which also has some interesting ideas on ways of using lulu.com for printing portfolio books, supposedly very cheaply...

Boris

C'est tout c'est fini: Boris the floor-sweeping robot

Okay - this is Boris...um... Boris VI, I guess. He picks up about 80% of the muck on the floor, and can negotiate pretty much anything on my floor, including the sheepskin rug (the lizards still give him a bit of trouble, though).

Boris VI is a mini-Boris - I've stripped out all the gear trains, directly connected the motor units to the wheels and the floorbrushes, and used smaller wheels so he now has a much smaller footprint.

I'm declaring him finished - considering what a difficult problem this is - the different obstacles, then different types of stuff to pick up - I reckon he'll do. As long as he doesn't come into contact with his nemesis (the phone cable) then he's fine. So I'm declaring him done, his field testing finished, and now he can get on with cleaning the fliippin' floor. Get to it, robot! (Bless his little metal heart).

Social Explorer

http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/home/home.aspx
..because you needed to know where all the Egytian-descent Floridians were living.

Wired has an article on Thomas Heatherwick

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/brightstuff.html
The man is a god. A god, I tell you!

I nearly got to do some work for him once, but turned it down. If I'd known who he was at the time... one of life's untaken roads. Still one of my all-time heroes, though. I mean, just check out the bridge:

My mate Tara on core77

http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/hosting_a_guest_design_project_5649.asp
When Tara just happened to mention a few weeks back that she'd just got back from teaching in Zurich, I must admit to being curious (but being far too polite to ask). Admittedly, core77 give the project short shrift, but considering that Napier's not exactly known for its design department, and the students are relatively young, I'm very proud of her for getting some good stuff done with them. Hey, at least it got noticed.

The actual project is blogged on Architonic here

Call for list: Made-up statistics

1 in every 24 people can teleport using the power of their minds.

There's a greater biomass of aunts on the planet than there is of ants.

Two-thirds of Malaysia's cultivated land is dedicated to growing computers.

Technical question: Can I use this to monitor domestic power consumption?

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=46931&doy=5m3&ForceUpdate=Y


I want to monitor my domestic power consumption. Now there are any number of gadgets that will do this for a reasonable price - plug-in things that will tell you how much an individual appliance is using, or monitors that sit by your electricity meter. Being a cheapskate, though, can anyone tell me why I don't buy a cheap clamp meter from Maplin, which I can clamp round any wire in the place?

I suppose it will rely on certain assumptions, like fairly constant input voltage and fairly constant consumption from my bits and pieces, but as an energy saving measure, can anyone see any flaws in my plan? Do you think it will be sufficiently accurate?

Green living: BBC Newsnight's Ethical Man blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/ethical_man_justin_rowlatt/
Only clicked through a couple of entries (and I'm not sure how much longer it will be updated, if the program has aired), but still interesting to those of us interested.

If that makes sense.

Question: What do you do with worn-once clothes?

core77 covered this debate on apartment therapy, which asked the question: when you've worn cloths once, what do you do with them?

Most people (although judging from their comments there seem to be several exceptions) are reluctant to mix them up with the clean stuff, or chuck them onto the dirty washing pile prematurely. I guess the standard approach is to drape them over a chair or something (that's what I do, anyway), on the assumption that they're going to be worn again soon. Of course, this means that every morning I transfer a big pile of clothing from the chair to my bed and back again while I rummage for things to wear. Other approaches seem to include using coat racks, clearing a space in your closet, or hooks on the backs of doors (I'm thinking that's not going to cope with the sheer quantity of clothing my chair has to deal with).

I have a special interst in this from two perspectives: I'm planning to redecorate my bedroom in the near future, and if I could design out that big pile of clothing that would be a bonus; and also, as the core77 article points out, it's bizarre that nobody has designed an item of furniture which deals with this thorny (and pretty much universal) problem.

So, in the spirit of ethnographic research (or just sheer nosiness), I'm curious - how do you deal with this issue?

Superuse.org: Where recycling meets design

http://www.superuse.org/
"Superuse is a online community of designers, architects and everybody else who is interested in inventive ways of recycling."

Most of the references seem to be Dutch, but that's just another good reason to register and post more stuff that's local to you. My favourite is the 'materials' section, which ranges from the eminently sensible through the perversely attractive to the pointlessly desirable...

Instructables : How to make your own (mini) Plastic Vacuum Former

http://www.instructables.com/id/ELPFLBN6A9EYJ3I2F0
God bless instuctables! I am so doing this.

Check out the comments: "To make it larger use peg board siliconed to a cat liter tub and attach it to a shop vac." Oooo....

Must admit I rather fancy a slightly larger version. Think I might need a slightly larger flat first though...

The answer to my living room artwork quest

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

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

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

Cripes (more pictures here).

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

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

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

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

For Dentworth: Boris V, the floor-sweeping robot

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

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

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

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

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