Short Wired piece with a fantastic video of a precision take off flight and landing of the Xombie test vehicle.
Video of Xombie flight…wow. | Wired
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Category Archives: Tech
Trip the LED fantastic
3D Printed rat skeleton, no longer: yucky, fragile, tiny…. | Wired
Another use for low cost 3D Printing, think about it, exact models of all sorts of biological specimens: surface, organs, bones, shells, exoskeletons, etc, scaled to a size that students or scientists can use for discussion, learning, planning, etc.
Cool, quite literally
New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight | phys.org, new technology based on nano tech material that tunes reflective / radiative properties of a surface, so efficient that its as effective as air conditioning powered by a similar sized PV panel. But this passive tech does not need to face the sun, radiating the heat back to space through the narrow band of frequencies that provide a window through our atmosphere.
Fascinating cool
Your first e-vehicle could be an e-bike | Machine Design
Your first e-vehicle could be an e-bike, I was thinking this very thought watching some guy in full gold wing touring togs whining along on his bright metallic red red scooter. The monocoque bodied eBike with 0-60 times as good as a good sedan and space for modest shopping would be an ideal 2nd / 3rd vehicle, useful 80 to 90% of the time.
Gyro stabilization makes the vehicle practical, if reliable enough.
Why Silicon Valley Is Winning the Robocar Race | Bloomberg news
Magazine ad, America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies
Why Silicon Valley Is Winning the Robocar Race
By Virginia Postrel Mar 17, 2013 6:30 PM ET
Good short piece, I think it’s pretty obvious but needed saying. Articles out of ‘Detroit’ talk about decades, about lawyers killing it, about the joy of driving, no the joy of striving. In fact this is another area where differential change is required, relative change, change suited to the specific here and now of the individual or local group, not society writ totalitarian.
Will Anyone Create a Killer App for Google Glass? | MIT Technology Review
Will Anyone Create a Killer App for Google Glass? | MIT Technology Review.
Yes! The question is how broad the appeal is. For certain jobs, medical care providers, law enforcement, field journalism, meter readers, etc it seems natural but for more general use? Shopping, running, biking, skiing, … anything where recording and displaying data while being in the world seems natural.
In the long run the tech in glass would appear suited to supplant – or subsume – other interfaces, when the camera can watch your fingers interact with a projected ‘underlay’ and let you type, write, talk-edit, etc while capturing audio,video, local, context. To do this a high speed ultra low power, ultra high bandwidth link to a cellphone / superphone type device and then the web will be needed for a half decade or so.
The combination of wrist, ear, eye and belt/pocket modules of your personal retinue plus remote computing will capture the world around you in a 24/7 data-log.
3D Printed Dresss
And a great reason to show a picture of a beautiful woman ( “muse and model” Dita Von Teese),
Photo: Andrew Tingle/Wired
Article in Wired, clothes cusomized to you are coming. The dress was made from several panels of laser sintered nylon giving the dress the ability to conform to the wearers body, cool and slinky sexy, if a bit Metro Goth.
What Should Have Been
Wired | The Common Space Fleet (1968) BY DAVID S. F. PORTREE 12.26.12 7:50 AM
Even as the moon landing was approaching futurists were looking to what should follow. They were looking at manned multi year missions based on the technology they had, reuse and incremental development of Apollo – Saturn technology. Just reading this article sent me of into a dream of what could have been. Just thinking about it made me sad, mad, glad: sad for what might have been, mad at those who sidelined the dream because of shortsightedness, glad that at least some had the sense to think-dream based on common sense.
Today Elon Musk and a few others are dreaming similar dreams maybe having read a few of the NASA documents though the basics are so common sense they do not have to have.
This World and Others 