Lick My Chip !

Interesting article over on TwistedSifter about the use of so-called « dazzle » or « razzle-dazzle » camouflage beginning during WWI. (The Wikipedia article is pretty good, too.) It’s a kind of practical op-art: The idea was not so much to make the ship invisible against the background, but to confuse enemy weapons operators as to its distance and heading. The Rhode Island School of Design has a wonderful online collection of various paper plans for dazzle camouflage schemes donated by Maurice L. Freedman, who was district camoufleur for the 4th district of the U.S. Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation, and would go on to invent the board game « Battleship. » [via Dude Craft]

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The hell? Who knew SkyMall sold USB rootkits? From the ad copy:

"Easy To Use & Undetectable Total Computer Spying Tool Covertly Monitors Passwords, Chatting, Photos, Websites & More!

Insert In USB, And In 5 Seconds Data Nano iBots Monitor All Computer Activity On ALL USER ACCOUNTS w/o Tell-Tale Hardware Left Behind.

Covertly Record Everything A Person Does On A Computer. Remove Stealth iBot After 5 Seconds: No Hardware Left Behind. Undetectable By Most Anti-Spyware Applications. Store Up to 10,000 Screenshots & Virtually Unlimited Text. Total Surveillance – Record All Computer Activity – Even On Other User Accounts.

Stealthbot (skymall.com, via Quinn Norton)

Eugene Hsu, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, is looking for a job. So to impress prospective employers, he made his curriculum vitae with Microsoft Paint. Hsu also talks about his friend’s overly-affectionate dog, his love for all drinks that are orange (except for carrot juice) and that he is a robot from the 2478 sent back in time to kill you. It’s a trippy and fanciful work of job-hunting throughout.

Link via Digg

Anything is better with BLUETOOTH. In medical is true, too. BLUETOOTH technology enables sounds to be transmitted real-time to a PC for further analysis, attached to medical records or reviewed online by medical professionals.

The application of the stethoscope is exemplary of one of the many benefits BLUETOOTH technology provides when it comes to physical wellness….the ability to monitor health away from a medical facility and therefore reduce costs of in-hospital care.

Expect to see more BLUETOOTH medical and health devices on the market thanks to the recently adopted BLUETOOTH low energy technology version of the Specification.

Geek artists are taking it to hilt this weekend in a massive concrete bunker where London’s Kinetica Art Fair is holding its second annual robot-palooza. There, one artist tattooed his calves with sound-wave patterns. Another rejiggered Leonardo DaVinci’s drawing contraption as a robot-powered 3-D scanner.

And a science-minded design collective created a musical installation from sound waves believed to be produced during the Big Bang. For entertainment, the Robotic Theremin Ensemble — three robots and one human — saw away on the eerie-sounding instruments.

Running through Sunday at the Ambika P3 venue, Kinetica Art Fair 2010’s four-day exhibition of digital whizbangery is expected to draw 10,000 attendees. Among the 150 new media experiments on display: Waves. Paul Friedlander’s installation (pictured above) relies on the artist’s “Chromastrobic” waveforms to produce a spiraling fountain of light

Check out a show-and-tell gallery featuring Kinetica Art Fair highlights below.

Images courtesy Kinetica Art Fair and the artists.

The Hydro Acoustic Big Bang Filter

Interactive Agents designed this installation that erupts with static at the behest of audience members. The audio emissions are based on the Cosmic Microwave Background that resulted, astrophysicists believe, from the Big Bang roughly 15 million years ago.

LANdelion

Hungarian collective Kitchen Budapest — Eszter Bircsák, Judit Boros, Zsolt Korai, Manuéle Lukács, Melinda Sipos and Andrea Sztojanovits — made this interactive sculpture from recycled materials that vibrate and glow when visitors approach. If a user blows toward the LANdelion, a light wave flows to the surface, accompanied by quadraphonic sound.

Shift (Large Calves)

Michael Zeltner’s audio-kinetic installation includes a permanent tattoo on the artist’s leg representing the sound component’s waveform. His materials: code, electronics, analog photography, human skin and blood.

Flutter

Cinimod Studio used 3-D software to create an animated sculpture that simulates the flutter of 100 virtual butterflies as visitors approach. Software controls the color of each module to mimic the iridescent reflections and scattering of light by the scales on a butterfly’s wings. The studio used similar tools to fabricate a UFO event in the skies above Rio de Janeiro.

Milk Float

Jump Ship Rat arts collective co-founder Ben Parry encrusted a 1975 milk truck with junk found on the streets of Liverpool to create a robotic orchestra made from interlocking motors, pulleys, wheels and cogs.

Waves

Self-described “scientific artist” Paul Friedlander (pictured) manipulates waveforms with his proprietary Chromastrobic technique. Light changes color faster than the eye can detect, which compels the brain to perceive a smooth sequence of an object’s constituent colors.

Homos Luninosos (Holographic Light Sculptures)

Rosaline de Thélin used fiber-optic cable as a medium to create hologramlike artwork inspired by astronomy and quantum physics.

See Also:

• Decode Exhibition Points Way to Data-Driven Art
• Videos: Animators ‘Recode’ Data-Driven Decode Art
• Decode: Digital Design Sensations
• The Art of Surveillance
• Big-Shot Game Designer Crafts Interactive Art After Hours
• Art Show Reveals Futurist Design for Old Russian Skyline

This is just one of 5 Science Fair Projects for the Internet, brought to you by College Humor. Other subjects are Facebook, Google search, comment thread eruptions, and how to build a great website. Link -via Digg

Is this how aliens cook their mussels?

The Foodpod is a cooking vessel designed as an easy and convenient way to quickly remove and drain foods that are cooked by boiling, blanching or steaming. Great with all foods; the Foodpod fully contains food for even and easy removal from hot water. The flexible silicone compresses to fit any size pot and for easy storage. The top of the Foodpod clips to the pan edge for easy removal. All materials are FDA food safe and BPA free. Foodpod is top rack dishwasher safe. 6-inch diameter and 5-inch tall.

More info: FoodPod

- All Day All You Can Eat Buffet

eldavojohn writes "The Sultan of Search is unveiling a new service (currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner) that will tackle a very old problem usually solved by bit.ly or tinyurl — URL shortening. Now, we've heard cries for sanity to prevent potential issues (like what if tr.im had shut down and broken millions of links?) but with one of the goliaths of the industry jumping in the ring it looks like URL shortening is here to stay. And a quick note for people who enjoy privacy, goo.gl explicitly states: 'Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.' You didn't think Google was going to sit back and let bit.ly harvest juicy data on 2.1 billion links that were clicked in November without trying to corner some of that action to make their ad suggestions more accurate, did you?" Google's shortening service is called Goo.gl.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flour is not as innocuous as it may seem. Like other carbohydrates, it’s really just a tiny chain of sugars at heart. And (as anyone who’s ever made s’mores knows) sugar can light up like a dried-out Christmas Tree that’s been exposed to an electrical spark. In fact, flour dust is highly explosive. Today’s experiment takes advantage of the burnability of flour to create a cool fire-breathing trick.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user pinkmoose, via CC

Ginger Coons writes in about the Open Colour Standard, « an effort to create a new colour standard to help free/open source graphics programs bridge the gap between screen and print. »

It’s like Pantone’s spot colour standard [ed: a widely used proprietary system for describing "spot" colors -- that is, colors that need special inks to print. Pantone distributes both the inks and books of color swatches. Designers pick colors out of the book and the printer loads the extra ink into her apparatus at print time], but not necessarily in opposition to it. Just different.

opencolour.org is the official site, currently in the form of a wiki hosting discussion about how an Open Colour Standard can/should be created. Here is a great big backgrounder, explaining and documenting the first stages of an original, not tied to an ink manufacturer, colour standard that F/LOSS graphics users can call their own.

And here’s a piece explaining the rationale and history behind an Open Colour Standard. Seems straightforward, but is proving to be surprisingly controversial. Looks like a lot of people really do see creating a new colour standard as futile, useless and hopelessly quixotic.

From the article: « What we have, then, is a venerable, widely supported, but largely inflexible and very expensive de facto standard. It has a huge impact on both print and digital media, not to mention the clothes you wear, the color you paint your living room, even the specific shades used to define healthy dirt or high-grade orange juice. It is, in short, a bloated monopoly eating up more and more of the color market… If [Open Colour Standard] works, this effort could open up spot color, make open-source software more viable for pre-press, and maybe even inspire a little kitchen table chemistry. Most importantly, it would take the cross-platform treatment of color out of the hands of a private company and put it where it belongs, with users. »

Open Color Standard

(Thanks, Ginger!)

(Image: untitled photo, licensed Creative Commons Attribution, from iboy_daniel’s photostream)

Wikipedia was probably pretty cool a few years back when you could just get a wild hair and immediately post up an article on The Artifacts, or whatever. But now it’s run by a dead-ender Debbie Downer « deletionist » nerd army.

The WSJ reports that the number of Wikipedia editors (real editors—not you) declined by nearly 50,000 in the first three months of this year alone. The trend is attributed to the fact that whereas in the past you used to be able to just hop in and edit shit, now you have to have your work "approved" by some superlayer of supereditors, many of whom take joy in shooting down the Wikipedia aspirations of the unapproved masses. Horror stories abound. So who are these Gatekeepers to all the internet’s knowledge?

A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

As you suspected: nerds.

A jar containing two of Galileo’s missing fingers has been located. The jar containing the digits has been missing for more than a century. An individual purchased them at auction and delivered them to the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy. The two fingers will join a third finger (image below) and a tooth that were removed from Galileo’s corpse in 1737.

The museum plans to display the fingers and tooth in March 2010, after it re-opens following a renovation, Galluzzi said.

The museum has had the third Galileo finger since 1927, so the digits will be reunited for the first time in centuries, he added.

Removing body parts from the corpse was an echo of a practice common with saints, whose digits, tongues and organs were revered by Catholics as relics with sacred powers.

« Galileo’s missing fingers found in jar »

A fashionable gentleman wearing 15 live lizards strapped to his chest was arrested by fashion police at LAX as he attempted to enter the country from Australia. US Customs agents said something about « smuggling, » and claim the two geckos, eleven skinks, and two monitor lizards were worth a total of $8,500.

The firms Bar Code Revolution [barcoderevolution.com] and D-Barcode [d-barcode.com] use a unique process that allows for an original design element to be integrated into a traditional barcode. While retaining the functionality of the barcodes themselves, their visual appearence are augmented with beautiful iconography or outlined in larger graphic patterns.

More barcode design collections are available at creattica and ESBlog. Via Fast Company.

See also Barcode Plantage and Barcode Art.