Machine Thinking

Kevin Atkinson created a neat virtual ball pit application that works in real time:

I’ve been playing with real-time physics libraries for a while, both 3d and 2d, and I’ve been wanting to do something for a while, but I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to come up with anything that grabbed me. But a couple weeks ago I had a brainwave and wrote this in just a couple days.

For those interested in such things, I didn’t use Box2D, which seems the current champ in developer mindshare in this tiny niche. I started out using it, and it’s quite nice, but it just wasn’t fast enough when I used enough circles/pixels to generate an intelligible representation of the video stream (there’re about a 1000 used in the demo above). Luckily, I chanced across the chipmunk physics library which uses some kind of fancy-pants geometric hashing to speed up collision testing, and it works quite nicely in real-time with 1000 pixels/circles.

Link

Michael writes:

About 7 years ago I was reading an article on Claude Shannon and came across one of the funniest ideas I had ever heard. Claude, you see, was one of these incredibly brilliant engineers with an obviously great sense of humor. As I understand it, he, along with Marvin Minsky came up with an idea they called the “Ultimate Machine”. Basically a plain box with a switch on the top. When you flip the switch, a hand comes out of the box and flips the switch off. Thats it.

Well, after reading the article, and laughing out loud, I decided that I HAD to build one of these boxes. So simple, and yet so funny.

Leave Me Alone Box


Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.

The 21″ x 13″ print can be purchased at my new store! store.thebigpugh.com

This piece inspired the login illustration that vimeo commissioned from me for their redesign earlier this year; it is still in use throughout the site. The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video. I’ll upload that for posterity later.

My life has changed a lot since i started this, so I thought it appropriate to include my friends, family and loved ones since they all were on my mind throughout the creative process. Enjoy!

Any tall construction has to be engineered to with stand the forces of the wind. You can accomplish this in two ways - making something so heavy the wind could never push it over, or make your construction so sparse as to not give the wind hardly anything to push against. For the tower Gustave Eiffel - a master of iron bridges and probably the first serious student of aerodynamics - used an iron filigree such that the wind has almost no grip on it even though it is constructed of over 15,000 pieces. If melted down to the size of it’s base (about four acres) the molten iron would rise to a height of only about 2.3 inches.

Before the four buttresses met at the first platform 180 feet off the ground they had to be supported by large wooden trusses. If any of them was off by even a tenth of a degree it would mean inches of difference at the top. To solve this problem Eiffel put the temporary trusses on hydraulic jacks so the permanent sides could be adjusted slightly for the pieces that connected them.

To get the pieces up the tower a set of “creeping cranes” was employed using the future elevator rails as they were constructed. The cranes could construct about 30 feet above their position and then ascend to begin the process again.

Probably the first important work of Modernism, the tower had to give into a few Victorian aesthetics of the time. On the first platform gingerbread arches that were purely decorative were eventually removed. Also, below the first platform are arches meant to remind Persians of their bridges. These arches have no structural purpose thus some find they are a discredit to the structural simplicity - while others find them a pleasant compliment to the exterior curves. Either way the remain to this day.

Finished in 1889 (where it served at the entrance arch for Exposition Universelle) at a final height of 1,063 ft (at the antenna) it was not surpassed in height until New York City’s Chrysler Building was finished in 1930.

Wikipedia - Eiffel Tower

Thanks to Mario Salvadori’s Why Buildings Stand Up

USC Institute for Creative Technologies presents (at SIGGRAPH 2007), a new low-cost autostereoscopic 3D display.

Mitch at watchismo has been importing the excellent LIP watch revivals. I’m the proud owner of the very first “new” 1972 24 Hour Watch #29b imported into the US:

Mitch writes:

LIP watches have been around for over 150 years but were unavailable in the United States until now. The company is reintroducing some of their most important models from a modern collection that remains as visionary today as when first unveiled 35 years ago. Most are faithful recreations while others have been updated with new designer visions.

The Mach 2000 and Revival Seventies collections were the brainchild of a revolutionary collective of French industrial designers, architects, interior decorators, and graphic designers. In the 1960s and 1970s, LIP enlisted a handful of these creatives to bring their truly original ideas of timekeeping to life in a series of watches. Among them was the prolific Roger Tallon, who designed everything from high-speed French TGV trains to the 1964 Helicoid Staircase (part of the MoMa Design Collection). Tallon’s LIP designs include the iconic Mach 2000 series, with asymmetrical cases and unmistakable ball pushers and crowns

About LIP

Examples of other LIP watches:

See them all at Watchismo.com

“Ive’s inspiration on Rams’ design principles goes beyond the philosophy and gets straight into a direct homage to real products created decades ago. Amazing pieces of industrial design that still today remain fresh, true classics that have survived the test of time.

The similarities between products from Braun and Apple are sometimes uncanny, others more subtle, but there’s always a common root that provides the new Apple objects not only with a beautiful simplicity but also with a close familiarity.”

via gizmodo

“Jos the finch” in The Netherlands makes extraordinary stirling engines of striking designs. These are only a couple of his amazing machines. It’s shocking that he gets such high efficiency from only a couple of tea candles.

translated home page from dutch

Wikipedia entry for “hot air” or sterling engines

Dylan Kehde Roelofs makes fantastic hand made light bulbs on
incandescentsculpture.com

“Technical details:

Life span: If you are content with the wan and soulless photons emitted by compact fluorescence , read no further.

The emphasis of these art objects is on their sculptural form and lighting quality, not quantity.”

I like them so much I bought one of the small four legged ones

via dezeen

The last segment of Disney’s Magic Highway USA. While much of it will likely never come true, there is a surprising amount that hasn’t yet, but you can imagine the not distant future when cell and GPS technology will be more closely integrated into cars.