December 2009
36 posts
TinkerCell: Life as LEGO →
From NS: “…users can pick different cells, membrane proteins, fluorescent proteins, enzymes and genes to create their organism. Tinkercell can then simulate the life form to see if it functions as expected.”
TinkerCell
"iSlate" Most Likely Name for Rumored Apple Tablet
From MacRumors, via TechCruch:
Apple … acquired the domain name islate.com back in 2007. Apparently, the Cupertino company registered the domain through brand protection firm Mark Monitor to conceal the fact that the domain name is theirs, as usual, but was briefly listed as the owner at some point in the past nonetheless.
If correct, that means we can add a rumor to a rumor: that the...
FutureMag: 2010 E-Reader Predictions
I missed this piece from PaidContent.org by the excellent Sarah Rotman Epps from a couple weeks ago, but caught it via Tom Standage:
1. E Ink will lose its claim to near-100% market share for e-reader displays.
2. Dual-screen mobile phones and netbooks will eat into e-reader demand.
3. Apps will make non-reading devices more e-book-friendly.
4. eReaders will get apps, too.
5. Amazon will launch a...
Craig Venter teams up with Exxon on Algae Fuel →
Top 5 best Viz Projects
Gotta props out to my former colleague Ben Fry for nailing this little idea we hatched at a Christmas party last year (though it’s hardly the first time Ben Fry had considered wrangling a viz project out of the greatest scientific theory ever iterated).
I’d been working on a web dev project celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday and asked Ben if there was any way we could visualize...
Complex Life
Will be checking out the new book, “The Perfect Swarm,” by Len Fisher, reviewed here in the New Scientist.
Hoping there’ll be a chunk in here about the work of Ian Couzin, whose Collective Animal Behavior Lab at Princeton is a personal favorite of mine. I met Ian a couple years ago at a World Economic Forum brainstorm session in Boston, where I was moderating a table of...
WatchMIT Media gang keep up the Minority Report future with a prototype vid screen that senses what’s in front of it. They call it the BiDi (for Bi-Directional).
The BiDi Screen is an example of a new type of I/O device that possesses the ability to both capture images and display them. This thin, bidirectional screen extends the latest trend in LCD devices, which has seen the incorporation of...
Pantone Color of the Year: Turquoise 15-5519
I was hoping that Turquoise 15-5519 had been selected based on an actual metric, like the most used color of the year. Instead, it looks as though the marketing team at Pantone considered their staggering swatches and came up with some cringe-worthy copy to accompany their selection:
Combining the serene qualities of blue and the invigorating aspects of green, Turquoise evokes thoughts of...
Ismond Rosen at the Wellcome Collection
Ismond Rosen’s work evokes in me a visceral recollection of 1970s medical art. I can’t say how it’s possible, since I was only a child in the 1970s, but seeing the images of his work, of which some is currently on display at London’s Wellcome Collection, reminds me of the offices my Mother worked in while administering the kidney dialysis unit at the Royal Victoria...
FutureMag: Paper-Power (from PrintWeek) →
FutureMag: Paper-Power →
From NYTimes Mag: YEAR IN IDEAS, “Printable Batteries”
Though you may not be aware of it, the technology already exists to create a video screen thin enough — and flexible enough — to fit seamlessly into the pages of this magazine. Ultrathin electronic devices can be built using a special inkjet printer that squirts fine layers of complex compounds instead of ink. When the compounds...
NYTimes Mag YEAR IN IDEAS: "Good Enough is the New... →
“Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere,” Robert Capps of Wired magazine wrote this summer in an essay called “The Good-Enough Revolution.” Companies that had focused mainly on improving the technical quality of their products have started to notice that, for many consumers, “ease of use, continuous availability and low price” are more important.
...
James Franco is a Soap Performance-Artist
Cheers to the pretentious nut-job genius of James Franco for explaining in the Wall Street Journal why he’s taken on the 20-episode gig at shlock-soap mainstay General Hospital. I’m letting the (unnamed) soap fans in my family know about this, and will check back for their well-honed critical assessment in a month.
US Patent Office to Fast-Track Green Innovation
According to this fresh story on CNET, “patent requests related to green technology will get the equivalent of the carpool lane at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.”
In a USPTO press release, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said, “by ensuring that many new products will receive patent protection more quickly, we can encourage our brightest innovators to invest needed resources in...
T Mag: Party in the Art World →
Great piece in the latest T magazine by Linda Yablonsky on the art world’s inclination to rokk out. Is it the result of all that creative and organizational fuel, or is this in fact the source of much of the rebuilding that’s going on, documented by the WSJournal here.
Design at the Serpentine: Konstantin Grcic's... →
The work of Jürg Lehni →
making good right here.
Money Makes the World Go Square →
While I’m not a gadget geek, I am keen on innovations that facilitate exchange of products and ideas. So, if money makes the world go ‘round, then Square makes it go, well… better.
Square, developed by, among others, the founder of Twitter, takes on the problem of an increasingly cashless society in which card-swipers are honking devices tethered to computers and phone lines,...
A BLOG curated by » Yohji in conversation with... →