You wouldn’t give it to her but Barbie is already over 50 years old. The doll made her debut at the American International Toy Fair in 1959 and has been a young girls (and gays) beauty icon for decades. Just image what Barbie would have looked like today if only she wasn’t so utterly plastic fantastic by nature. Still a pretty woman, stylish too! Peculiar image of the week (creator unknown: let us know).
Related: Beauty kit for little girls, Virtual Miss, Photoshop Beauties, Objects of desire, Real Mario, Software that ranks female beauty.
Recently were introduced, the OOMouse…
…and the Magic Mouse. Both tools are developed to browse the ones and zeros more easily.
It almost seems unfair to compare them, so I won’t. But what I would like to compare instead is both companies’ mission statements:
Open Office: Our mission statement is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
Apple: Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.
The first reads in one word: “community” (building and sharing together). The second reads: “ego” (look how good I am). Now look again at their mices.
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Image: A. Sidorov
Have you ever fantasized about creatures which carry the biggest smile? Or creatures which are so deeply covered with fur that you wish they were real? Good news, soon you’ll be able to watch your favorite animal become alive!
While the average consumer is still happy with laser printer technologies the first 3D printer which uses organic materials is on its way. Currently we already manage to print cell structures of about 2 inches high. Once finished these devices will be used for noble purposes like printing organs, victimless meat or other food. However, the real fun starts some years later, when they are cheap enough to buy one yourself.
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Although it exists for less than 20 years, online search has become such a commonplace activity it is hard to imagine life without it. For your grandparents it didn’t exist. For you it is a second nature. For your grandchildren it will be a first nature.
Via Boomerang. Related: Your grand-grand-grand parents new media, Google everything, Google 2084, Google DNA, Google tracks flue via sick searchers, Google manhole, Googling in physical space.
The Discovery series ‘Ways to save the planet’ the episode ‘Wrapping Greenland‘ shows how Dr. Jason Box uses reflective blankets to cover glaciers in Greenland. Due to global warming glaciers start melting causing land to flood. Dr. Jason Box argues that it is expensive to use blankets to cover all glaciers, but that it is more expensive to reorganize all coast lines.
Maybe we should make the expenses, as we ourselves have caused global warming. Maybe we should take another leap in evolution, just as our ancestors the Sapiens did to survive in constant changing conditions. But should we then focus on preventing the changes, or should we focus on adapting flexibly to them?
Related: If the implications of global warming were fair, Fight climate change, hack the planet, Doggerland – Mapping a lost world, Artificial ‘trees’ should stop climate change, Diesels global warming ready campaign, Let the Dutch bury the carbon, Humans to blame for global warming.
For over 40 years Australian artist Stelios Arcadious Stelarc has made art with medical instruments, prosthetics, robots, virtual reality systems and biotechnology to investigate alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. In one of the interviews he says: The assumption being that if the body was altered it might mean adjusting its awareness.
His ‘Ear on the Arm‘ piece is a full sized ear constructed of the living cells permanently placed under the skin of Stelarc’s forearm – a clear homage to the famous tissue engineered ear mouse. The microphone and sound transmitter were supposed to be inserted inside his body within the ear shaped scaffold. This ended up to be not feasible yet due to infections that electronics caused.
The vision behind the project was to generate an alternative electronically enhanced organ to better interact and operate within the World. At the same time it provokes a debate about a desire to redesign and alternate human’s body evolutionary structure.
Stelarc points out: Now we can engineer additional and external organs to better function in the technological and media terrain we now inhabit. All very well, allthough it’s perhaps a better strategy to redesign our technological environment so that it fits our existing human physique.
Related: Phone Tooth, USB finger, High Heels, How biotech will drive our evolution, Homo desktopus, Humans are the sex organs of technology.
Avatarian Graveyard supplies a service for virtual addicts – people who excessively or compulsively spend time in virtual environments – to help them reintegrate into everyday society.
Avatars, digital identities, alter egos and other digital shadows of their psyche can be uploaded to the Avatarian Graveyard. Once this upload is completed a compound within ignites, causing an internal burnout of the compound material and thus also destroying the circuits that hold the virtual identities. All is lost and to provide a way of coming to terms with this loss and thus helping the grieving process it is possible to scatter the ashes and use the Avatarian Graveyard as urn to place somewhere meaningful as a reminder of ones past or as the coffin shape suggests, one can also burry the object.
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If the six hour crash course on synthetic genomics is a bit too much for you, there is always a more snappy TED lecture in which Craig Venter ponders on whether we can create new life out of our digital universe. Needles to ask what his answer is.
Dr. Venter now has a database now with about 20 million genes and thinks of them as the design components of the future. In little over half an hour the audience is walked through the latest endevours in synthetic genomics.
His talk covers topics like: How to boot up a chromosome. How he plans to replace the petrochemical energy with bacteria that turn CO2 into energy. How to take security measures. Why people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at the time have missed much of biology. And why it is a mistake to think they are trying to create life from scratch, as they are merely playin on one of the key principles of nature: all life derives from other life.
Nature changes along with us and it is changing fast. Buckle up for a catalyst of evolution.
Related: Build a better being, DNA Synthesizer, Top 10 new organisms, Mapping the DNA world, Google DNA, Poetry of Genetics, Crash course on synthetic genomics, How biotech will drive our evolution, Human genetic DNA sequencing soon child play?.
Old nature provided us with a wide variety of food: fresh milk, crispy vegetables, nutritious meat. Yet this is not enough, we want more:
We want a printed steak, square fishsticks, dinosaur nuggets, organic coca-cola, hyper fruit, cloned meat, potato-free potato chips, frankenwein, vegetarian hamburgers and hypernatural tomatoes. We want vitamine+Q10 yoghurt that makes you loose weight. We want to hear the sound of a sausage when we bite it – we want notice how well designed that sausage sound really is.
Already for thousands of years people have been food designers. How will food technology develop itself into the 21th century? The Philips Food Design Probes investigate how we will eat and source our food in the future, like in 15 to 20 years. There are 3 products we might have in our homes by then:
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Tags:
Bionics,
Design for debate,
Designed by Evolution,
Feed Back,
Food Technology,
Hypernature,
Image Consumption,
Made to debate,
manipulating growth,
Officegarden,
supermarket
Today’s technology advances so rapidly that people are often unable to update their media schemas in time and as a result are left cluelessly in awe of it all. Mike Thompson’s Wifi dowsing rod aims to work against this: By basing the design for a wireless internet detector on ancient technology, the user should immediately feel at home with the device.
Although perhaps impractical and anecdotal, the Wifi dowsing rod is an intriguing attempt of using ‘magic’ as a construct to cope with the technological complexity accumulating around us. A great gift for your grand-grand-parents.
Related: Magical interaction, Your grand-grand-grand-parents new media, Dandella shows you the way, Voodoo communication device.
