I see loads of great stuff every single day, but since switching from Tumblr I’ve been quite poor at posting sideblogs.
I’m gonna up the frequency a little, but I promise I’ll only show you the good stuff, like this one, which came via @rochellelara:
So many memories! And think of all the breakthroughs yet to come.
It’s the Summer. It’s an extremely hot day here in London, the hottest day of 2011, in fact. So it’s with just the tiniest stretch of the imagination that I could be right there in the desert watching Markus Kayser at work on his next great experiment.
He’s built his own solar-powered 3D printer out of a large panel of magnifying glass and a computer-guided motorised panel, the raw material being the desert’s primary natural resource: sand.
With his design, he is able to create a focused laser beam that melts sand, so that it cools and hardens in a design of his choosing. In effect, he is ‘growing’ his designs right out of the sand. It’s really, really impressive:
Markus describes the process on the project’s website:
Silicia sand when heated to melting point and allowed to cool solidifies as glass. This process of converting a powdery substance via a heating process into a solid form is known as sintering and has in recent years become a central process in design prototyping known as 3D printing or SLS (selective laser sintering).
These 3D printers use laser technology to create very precise 3D objects from a variety of powdered plastics, resins and metals – the objects being the exact physical counterparts of the computer-drawn 3D designs inputted by the designer.
By using the sun’s rays instead of a laser and sand instead of resins, I had the basis of an entirely new solar-powered machine and production process for making glass objects that taps into the abundant supplies of sun and sand to be found in the deserts of the world.
Markus with his Solar Sinter
Sintering is a natural process, commonly occuring products being Fulgurites, which are glass tubes that form deep in the sand when lightning strikes in the desert. Each have a unique quality: colour; shape; consistency and location, which together with their ‘atmospheric origins’ they’ve become quite collectible artefacts.
My take is that Markus’s device will allow command over the sun to grow one’s own kind of ‘artisanal fulgurites’, quite a powerful idea, and undoubtedly a great use of technology that harnesses our most abundant natural resources in a really cool way. Nice one!
You know how I love my phone like it was a sexy robot from the future? Well check this shit out. It’s also a full-blown GBA emulator, which with its massive AMOLED screen, and dual core processing, makes my Samsung way more awesome than I could possibly have conceived.
This is a screenshot from Tiger GBA running Advance Wars 2, on it’s original resolution (you can upscale but I like to kick it oldshool). The app integrates with a ROM downloader, where one can select ‘backups’ of the games they already own in order to play.
Legal note: it is against the law to download and play ROM backups of games you do not own. So play safe!
I can’t play any instruments, but this is the album I like to play about with on Djay, mixing software for iPad
Voted best guitar solo ever, so get ready for a face-melter! Thanks to Andrew for the hookup.
Hmm… no comment.
I remember this blaring out over the kitchen speakers as I began to develop a taste for music.
These guys were the soundtrack to my summer last year – nearly that time again!
Happy listening, Tom x
I wonder if Spielberg, Jackson, Wright, Moffat, Cornish et al have considered the mystery of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ in their latest CGI film, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn?
I’m talking about the principle that when things appear, or intend to appear as visibly human as possible they often can’t jump the gap in one’s perceptions, thereby freaking the living crikey out of an observer.
Take some time to digest the diagram above, and then hit up the video below to see what I mean. My suspicion is that, yeah, they’ve just about played it safe, but the characters in the film will feel less familiar than they did in the comics, or even the cartoon series.
For more on the Uncanny Valley, check out my post on Branded Robotics, where a leading scientist gives me his thoughts on what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully, the Tintin creators have done their research too.
Digital Cortex is © 2011 Tom Saunter under this License and with this Disclaimer.
