I always assumed messing around with your product’s barcode for marketing purposes was, like, a violation of the Geneva Convention or something. Like if you tried to turn your packaging’s boring rectangular barcode into a zebra, or whatever, you’d start to get late-night phone calls from Brussels: “Nice supply chain you have there. Be a shame if something were to, you know, happen to it.” Turns out nobody really cares, so long as it scans
From the MAKE Flickr pool Alas, old friend VHS – has it really come to this?! Doomed to spend the rest of your media lifecycle supporting stacks of newfangled digital media. *Sigh* … and how much longer ’til we see those same DVD cases supporting a heap of flash drives/etc? I’ll keep an eye on […]
Electron Beam Free-Form Fabrication (EBF3) is a rapid prototyping technology developed by Karen Taminger of NASA’s Langley Research Center. Dr. Taminger is prone to market EBF3 by analogy to Star Trek style “replicator” technology, which is nothing but shameless hype. Still, the basic idea is an interesting twist on extrusion-based 3D printing technologies (although there’s not really any “extrusion” going on), and is under development with an eye towards space-based fabrication. Working in outer space would eliminate the system’s major ground-based shortcoming, which is the requirement for maintaining a vacuum or inert atmosphere to prevent oxidation of the weld.
Hey, remember when Radiohead released a bunch of 3D data for their music video “House of cards”? Now someone has used that data to print a 3D model of Thom Yorke’s head.
Starting on December 5, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will award $40,000 to the first registered team to correctly report the location of ten eight-foot-diameter weather balloons distributed randomly across the continental United States. From the challenge website:
Think cement is just cement? Not so. These unlovely mugs are nonetheless very special. Prepared from special synthetic aluminosilicate materials called “geopolymers” (Wikipedia) by members of Dr. Waltraud M. Kriven’s research group at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, these mugs were tested in a special “mug drop” event at the 2004 American Ceramic Society (ACeRS) conference, and supposedly “were impossible to break at even 50ft onto bare concrete.” Danger Room’s David Hambling recently posted a nice overview of geopolymer technology with a view towards defense applications. These presentation slides by Dr. Kriven include some actual formulae.
Must. Resist. Yakov Smirnoff. Joke. This is a war memorial, after all, and to a particularly nasty bit of a particularly nasty war, at that. Still, in the same way that Italians can laugh about the fact that, yes, it can be a bit of a pain to renew your driver’s license in Italy, or that Estadounidenses can admit that, yes, we have been known to occasionally over-commercialize certain things, even patriotic Russians will see that there is something of the stereotypically Russian in this story.
This memorial was erected in Ukraine shortly after WWII to commemorate the legions of fallen dead. For 50 years its eternal flame burned natural gas piped in under the Soviet administration. Then…well, things fall apart, as everyone knows. With the breakup of the USSR, the flow of free natural gas into Ukraine stopped and it became too expensive to keep the torch lit. I’m sure it was a sad day that finally saw the flame go out.
Apparently it sat unlit for several years until this compromise solution was achieved: The flame would be converted into a cell-phone tower, the transceivers concealed by a round facade bearing a pixelated flickering LED-flame image funded by the cell-phone company. One of those capitalistic solutions where everyone wins, but only kind of.
To my eye, this is in awful taste. But the story, I think, is kind of beautiful. If it’s really true that the only two alternatives were to leave the flame unlit or to replace it with a cheesy simulation, I think, ultimately, that I would have made the same choice. And as we continue to oxidize the world’s supply of hydrocarbons, sooner or later the sensibility of keeping fossil-fuel flames burning “eternally,” only for symbolic purposes, may well become an issue in other parts of the world.
