A New Book Every Weekday On Wink Books

One of my passions is books. I love books. So does my wife and we have quite a collection in our home, which almost borders on a library.

One of my favorite websites is Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools, which I have contributed to on occasion. Well, Kevin has cooked up a new website for new books called Wink and it promises "remarkable books that belong on paper" at the rate of one every weekday.

From the site: "Wink scours bookstores, libraries, flea markets, and online retailers looking for books that you must experience; books that are sensual, three dimensional, robust. We seek out artifacts that you must hold in your hands or unfold in your lap. Wink collects books that optimize what books do best on paper: open up new worlds."

I'm all about opening up new worlds. How about you?

MIT Engineers Design ‘Living Materials’

Here's one that everyone should be interested in. The good folks at MIT have devised a way to bridge technology and biology using bacteria.

“Our idea is to put the living and the nonliving worlds together to make hybrid materials that have living cells in them and are functional,” says Timothy Lu, who is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering.

The authors of the paper see this technology as being useful in solar cells, self-healing materials, or diagnostic sensors. They don't mention it, but I see possibilities in the field of prosthetics.

Here's a link to the article.

Fun Time! Supercut Of The Most Influential Visual Effects In Movies Since 1980!

3-D Printed Skull Successfully Implanted In Woman

From NBC News online....

"Doctors in the Netherlands report that they have for the first time successfully replaced most of a human’s skull with a 3-D printed plastic one — and likely saved a woman's life in the process."

Read more HERE.

OMG! Who Stole My Ads?

What would the world be like if invasive street advertisements were replaced with classical paintings?  Artist Etienne Lavie has created a series of photographs that answers that question.

Travel Photo of the Week

Hong Kong skyline

How To Make A "Thing"

Ayah Bdeir is the founder and CEO of littleBits, a company that makes and sells tiny modular circuits "bits" that can be used to create complete, functioning electronic devices good for educational purposes or just plain fun.

Ms. Bdeir has written a wonderful piece on creativity called "How To Make A Thing" that explains why she created littleBits and goes on to encourage people to get their hands dirty making something.

"Every technology that changes the world usually starts in the hands of experts or large industry, but the real opportunity to affect change in society is when it becomes democratic, and accessible to everyday people."

I couldn't have said it better. Now, go out and make something.

Ten Things That Could Wipe Out Life On Earth

Just the thing for Monday morning, right?

Japan’s Beautiful Manhole Covers

Japanese photographer S. Morita photographs manhole covers. Not just any manhole covers, mind you, but beautiful manhole covers.

Fun Time! Insane Random Game Concept Generator!

Over at a site called Orteil's Stuff, there a is a fun page where you input any information into a "search"
window and a game concept will be generated.

So if you put in the words "Giant Gorilla" the game concept you get back is "An FPS where you color evil wizards and the bad guy is constantly stalking you wherever you go."

I put in my name and got "An adventure game where you feed spirits of nature to slow global warming."

There's also a sanity function which will give you either a sane or an insane version of a game. I picked the insane verion. The games are funnier. Careful though, any spelling or capitalization change will give you a different game concept. If I take out the capitalization of Giant Gorilla, the game changes to "An artsy game where you link soldiers in binary."

I know which game I'd rather play.

How To Completely Erase Your Identity From The Internet

Want to disappear? Go off grid? Tired of the internet doing an NSA number on your life? Well, guess what? You can erase yourself  from the internet! The website Who Is Hosting This offers a tidy little infographic (included below) that shows you the steps you need to take.

6 Months Spent Making A 3D-Printed Fully Posable Action Figure or Why The Future Is Going To Be Built One 3D-Printed Thing At A Time

From 3ders.org....

"Aaron Thomas has spent the past six months developing a 3D printed 10" action figure consisting of 400 independent parts. Each part was printed separately and assembled by hand. His creation is named "Ronin" and it has over 50 articulated joints and LED electronics, making it a fully posable figurine. Thomas used an Ultimaker personal 3D printer to make his design reality."

My questions is: why will kids want to go to the toy store when they can design and create the exact toy they want, instead of settling on a compromise?

Travel Video of the Week

How To Predict The Odds Of Anything

This Is Serious

NASA has a new study out that centers on the concern that civilization could abruptly collapse and based on this study it appears to be a strong possibility unless humanity does the seemingly impossible and reverses course on the many issues that plague us.

In the opening paragraphs the study states that......

"It is common to see human history as a relentless and inevitable trend toward greater levels of social complexity, political organization, and economic specialization, with the development of more complex and capable technologies supporting ever-growing population, all sustained by the mobilization of ever-increasing quantities of material, energy and information."

But that...

"In fact, cases where this seemingly near-universal, long-term trend has been severely disrupted by a precipitous collapse often lasting centuries have been quite common."

The two big issues that the study brings up are environmental degradation and income disparity and we are currently in the midst of a culture war over these things.

I'm pretty sure that this is how it goes every time: wealthy elites ignoring the world around them while thinking that their wealth and power is either justified by their mere existence or ordained in perpetuity by some god.

The study goes on to describe the conditions some of the instances and conditions of collapse that have occurred before in human history. Too bad the people causing the most disruption won't read this study or if they do, will dismiss it as the ravings of the liberal media.

Air Traffic In Europe

Beautiful visualization of Europe's air traffic from the air.

Fun Time! The 7 Most Annoying People To Watch TV With!

From Dorkly comes this illustrated list of the most annoying people in the world, the ones who interrupt a perfectly good TV show with inane questions or ridiculously inappropriate behavior. My favorite? The Nitpicker! Click on the link above to see the other six.

Small Prefab Home Stacks Space To Fit Family Of 3

Here's another great video from Faircompanies.

The $1 Origami Microscope

From MIT's Technology Review: "Manu Prakash and pals at Stanford University in California, reveal how they’ve designed and built an origami microscope that is constructed largely out of folded paper and costs less than a dollar to make. And they say their device could revolutionize the way billions of people see the world around them."

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Travel Photo of the Week

La Palma Island, Canary Islands - photo by Dominic Dähncke

If We're Running Out Of Water, Meat Is To Blame

It takes 5.4 gallons to produce a head of broccoli.

It takes 3.3 gallons to grow a single tomato.

It takes 2,000 gallons to make one pound of beef.

Do you want to lower your "water footprint"? If you change your diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers you will reduce your food-related water footprint by 30%. Going vegetarian reduces that water footprint by almost 60%.

3 Simple Ways To Catch A Liar In The Act and 1 Easy Way

This article from Time and INC. claims that according to researchers cited by the Harvard Business School, there are three easy ways to catch a liar.

1. Liars tend to use a lot more words to make their points than the truth-tellers did.

2. People who swear more often tend to lie more often.

3. Liars tended to use third-person pronouns more often (“he,” “she,” and “they”).

That sounds good, but human judgment is still involved. How about using a computer instead? An article in New Scientist describes the work of linguists Massimo Poesio at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, and Tommaso Fornaciari at the Center for Mind/Brain sciences in Trento, Italy, who use a technique called stylometry, to create software that can tell when someone is lying.

I guess the idea of robot overlords is getting less far-fetched every day.

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel

The universe is a big place and it's hard to get an idea of how big.

Here's a wonderful illustration, from Josh Worth, that shows you the scale of our solar system as if our moon was the size of one single pixel.

Just click HERE and scroll to the right.

Remember, things are really far apart.

Fun Time! Metropolis II (The Movie)!

A film about a sculpture by Chris Burden. Now at the Los Angeles Museum of Art.

How Much Does $1M Buy You In The World's Great Cities?

Do you have a million dollars to spend on living space? In prime locations around the world, $1 million doesn't buy much.

The Wall Street Journal has a map that will tell you just how much (or rather how little) you can get. London? 271.2 Square feet. Tokyo? 812.6 square feet. Beijing? 566.1 square feet.

Where's the most space for the money? Cape Town, South Africa at 2315.3 square feet. The least? Monaco at 161.4.

Growing Bricks With Bacteria

More information HERE.

Travel Photo of the Week

Northern UK

Make Fresh Water With A 3D Printed Water Distiller

Cem Schnitzler wants to help people in the developing world make fresh water. Fresh water is not something easily obtained for over three billion of our world's inhabitants and Mr. Schnitzler has designed a simple device to distill water that can be 3D printed. He is offering .stl files so you can print your own.

The device has a body, a hopper, and a cap, which are 3D printed in a UV resistant material. Waste water is put into the base of the device, which would be printed in black so as to absorb light from the sun. In the sun, the Water Maker heats up to 85°C, steam forms and condenses along the inside of the device’s hopper. The condensed water, streams along the sides of the funnel and into a reservoir lining the edge of the device.

Voilà! Fresh water!

Creatures Of The New Hebrides Trench

Scientists have found what lives over four miles beneath the Pacifi Ocean in the Hebrides Trench.

"We're starting to find out that what happens at one trench doesn't necessarily represent what happens in all the trenches," said Dr Alan Jamieson, from Oceanlab at the University of Aberdeen., UK.

Lunar Impact Blast (11 September 2013)

Asteroid hits moon. That must'a hurt.

Fun Time! Make Your Own Radar!

It's Saturday and you're looking for something fun to do. What could be more fun than making your own radar?

From Hack A Day comes this easy-to-build radar project. From the article....

"Radar is simple, it consists of a radio transmitter and receiver. Radar is a World War Two acronym meaning Radio Direction and Ranging, in other words a radar consists of a radio transmitter and receiver where the range to an object is measured by clocking the time between the transmitter transmitting a known modulated waveform and the receiver receiving this waveform scattered from a target."

I really like the re-purposed coffee cans, myself.