Check out my Twitter account. I’m a little less strict about what I post there as compared to here, so expect some more local Montréal stuff, some more techy/computery posts, and more silly stuff along with the personal blathering.
Partially inspired by this talk from the Long Now foundation (don’t ask me how), I got thinking about concept cars, and in particular how they tend to shape the view of the public. While they may represent a far-off future of the automotive industry, I find it interesting to see how much attention they tend to get, despite their often blatant impracticality in the present.
Above is the Hummer O2, which was created as part of an environmental design competition in 2006. While its intentions may have been good, it will never become a production car. It’s designed to have algae-filled panels which turn sunlight into fuel on the go, opening like “a flower” to capture the sun’s energies. The stupidity of carrying around several hundred pounds of algae-filled water to make a tiny fraction of the fuel needed should be pretty obvious. It’s the sort of empty, glamourous design that doesn’t make any sense in the real world.
Yet it somehow—bafflingly—managed to win the environmental design competition.
This is the sort of work that gives design a bad name. It’s the sort of empty, far-flung futurism that lead people to mistakenly believe that biofuels or hydrogen or what have you are just around the corner, and that they can just keep on driving like oil isn’t about to peak, or global warming is not a problem. That convinces them they can still buy a wasteful house in the suburbs because technology will come to their rescue, despite the fact that there is little indication that we can or will make any such switch.
“Real artists ship” was something said by Steve Jobs when working on the original Macintosh. Apple almost never releases any design concepts (at least under Jobs). They stick to what they can ship. You can bet that their designers have some fantastic sketches filed away, but they don’t let that get mixed up with their products.
The car companies have been trumpeting biofuels, hydrogen, and electric cars for years, and I think it’s lead us to become lazy about the future of our energy system. We have to stop deluding ourselves into thinking Hydrogen is just over the horizon—it’s been “almost here” for the last couple of decades.
What we can and should do now is reduce our dependence on cars. We don’t have to stop driving, we just need make sure we live in places that allow us to walk, bike or take public transit.
In honour of the end of this year’s fantastic TED conference, here’s one of my favourite talks posted on their site in the last few months: Virginia Postrel’s excellent take on the true meaning of glamour.
CBC’s Best of Ideas Podcast has just completed a fantastic series on Climate change by author Gwynne Dyer. It’s 3 hours long, and does a great job summarizing of the current state of the climate crisis. Riveting and sobering.
I really like these glasses made out of used bottles. It’s such a simple idea, and I think they look great. A little expensive, but a great idea.
Via Lake Jane.
One of the most bizarre tourist attractions in Lithuania’s capital of Vilnius, a city which, under its skin, has a lot of off-key humour already, is their statue of Frank Zappa. There is no link between the musician and the city. The statue was basically a joke, the product of a somewhat ironic Zappa fan club, which reportedly put together exhibitions of documents about his apparent love of Lithuania before they finally built the statue.
But there was never any relationship between Zappa and Lithuania, it was all basically a big joke. A very elaborate joke, taken very far.
Sean from Said the Gramophone has a neat little piece in the Guardian about a copy of the statue moving back to Baltimore—Zappa’s home.
Haunting, terrible images of St. Petersburg’s past, mixed with images of the city in present day taken from the same spots. More here.
Via Vinny.
Here’s a silly post for late on a Sunday afternoon. I was playing a borrowed copy of the recent DS game Kirby Squeek Squad (Hey, I like my old-school side scrollers), when I ran across this accidental bit of cartoon obscenity:
For those of you wondering, that’s actually his belly-button. An outie. A really outie. A so-outie it looks like something altogether more obscene. This has not been modified in any way.
I was understandably shocked. This character is like this for the entire mini-game. It’s something straight out of The Accidental Video Game Porn Archive. I just have to wonder how many people neglected to catch this during the development process.
This is the poster for the Czech version of Ghostbusters. There are lots more here.
Songsmith is a piece of software made by Microsoft which helps those of us without any musical talent make music, sort of. You sing into a microphone, the software runs it through its algorithms, and spits out a new version with accompanying background music. For those of us with roughly the musical ability of a two-year old banging on a pot with a wooden spoon, this is actually has some appeal.
Some people realized that you could feed in the vocal tracks from some popular songs, and you’d get out whole new version of the song.
I never thought I’d ever post something by Rush on the blog, but here’s Songsmith’s version of Tom Sawyer:
See also: Eye of the Tiger, Buddy Holly, Creep, Notorious B.I.G., and Sgt. Pepper.
Doesn’t look like anyone has tried putting in Bohemian Rhapsody, but someone should.
Via Vorg.