Freeconomy is apparently a kind of distributed gift economy with an international membership of about 10,000. Its faux silent movie introduction is certainly amusing.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
This masterful conversion of a non-functional early C20th Elgin pocketwatch casing into a fully functional LED-handed timepiece with vibrating alarm and light-responsive display is a thing of beauty — which one might expect from a project which took two years and cost $1,000 (not including the heirloom watch). Australian maker Paul Pounds (whose recent PhD [...]
The UK’s Channel 4 website recently featured Kitchen Contraptions from the Past, a fascinating and enlightening slideshow of some beautiful and terrible examples of the Victorian (and pre-Victorian) homemaker’s mechanical assistant, including the “Raisin Cleaner” pictured here.
Not the newest of news, but something I’d been meaning to mention for some time is the announcement from Swiss watchmaker Ulysse Nardin of their leap from making fine mechanical watches) and nautical precision instruments since 1846, to the modern technology of mobile telephony.
Initial reports from Gizmag and Treehugger were light on details, but I’ve [...]
26
Mar
Printing in Brass
Online fabber agents Shapeways have just introduced brass to their formerly all-plastic offerings. Objects are currently limited to customised napkin rings, but suddenly the near future looks Steamier than ever!
Ted Chiang’s superb “Exhalation” is the deeply philosophical and moving story of a pneumatic robot who dissects his own brain to discover the secrets of the universe. Night Shade Books, who published Eclipse 2 (ed. Jonathan Strahan) in which “Exhalation” first appeared, have just posted a copy of the Hugo Award-nominated story to their website [...]
Have just discovered that Antipodean moviemaker Anthony Lucas’ justifiably famous (and Academy Award-nominated) “The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello” has been available legally, gratis, on YouTube, since October last year. It’s available as a single 26-minute High Quality video, which thankfully sidesteps the traditional graininess of YT’s offerings. (Sadly, Lucas’ impressive “Holding Your Breath” [...]
5
Mar
Victorian medicine
New Scientist have just published a series of a dozen “bizarre devices from medicine’s dark past”. Like the late Victorian male chastity belt pictured, they’re fascinating and scary in equal measure.
The redoubtable journal also recounts that an 1886 method for guessing a person’s height based on parental heights, age and sex is apparently ten times [...]
Aeolus