Month: December 2005

Not Quite As Planned

Photo by Steve Kittelsrud

Ever have one of those days? Well the city of Sioux Falls South Dakota had one on Saturday. The old Zip feed mill (a landmark for over 50 years) was set to be imploded by 100 pounds of explosives. The plan was for it to drop and then fall over in a big pile. The entire event was made into kind of festival, parties, a drawing to see who gets ot push the button, multi camera TV coverage, the works. Well , the countdown hit zero and the demo charges blew and the building was going to have nothing to do with following the plan. It dropped and tilted but stopped far short of the mark. Looks like it’s going to be a job for the wrecking ball and jackhammer after all. First they have to make the place safe to work around, as it is it could fall over in a strong wind. My brother lives in Sioux Falls and he put together this photo you see above this. No, the sign didn’t originally say ’tilt’. He also took some panoramic photos from the top, I’m still waiting on those.

This link will take you to the KELO TV page where you can see all the exciting tilting action for a bunch of different angled. 

Boom Blunder

The HAL-5 is Online

 

As noted by me here a few months ago, the HAL bionic suit aims to enhance the strength of the person wearing it. It looks a bit better than the first version, more like something were accustomed to seeing in a Japanese cartoon (yeah, we all get the look of new technology from cartoons don’t we…) The info is a little sparse, but it does look cool.

The HAL-5 ready to battle

Ice Lens

Fire! 

Take some water and let it freeze (without bubbles) and then carefully shape it into an ice lens in order to focus the suns energy on dry tinder to make fire. Good stuff to know if your out in the cold and need to make fire. Not that you would have a lot of time to do this if your only chance of lighting a fire was this method. I think you would freeze solid before you got the technique down. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that should be practiced before you need to use it. However, even as ice has a lower refraction index than glass with some time and practice you could build a simple refracting telescope out of this. A few ice lenses and some way of mounting them would be about all you would need. How cool would it be to be able to look at the magnified craters of the moon with an ice telescope?

Fire From Ice

‘Aeon Flux’ Who?

Aeon Flux

When I first found about a live action version of the cult cartoon ‘Aeon Flux‘ I was all for seeing it. I even blogged in here. However, after hearing that the film was not screened for critics I have a strong feeling that this is going to be an  instant crapper of a film. Other things support this too, like the fact that the star Charlize Theron is going to be dressed more like Trinity than the character she is playing. That bites. Second, in an interview with Peter Chung (the original creator of the character, the shorts on MTV’s Liquid Television and the cartoon series that aired on the same network) he said that he had little to do with the movie and wasn’t all that happy about the story being set in a definite time frame. He also said that the stylistic design of his world was better suited to animation than the big screen. (I wish I could find the link to this interview – I’ll post it when I do. For now you can read this one. )

I’m going to go out on a (short) limb and say that this movie will suffer from the same thing that kills any movie that has been ‘re-envisioned’ by a director. The universe will be changed, the look will be altered, the characters will act differently so it’s going to be a movie with things just loosely based on the original. For fans of the old series it’s going to be a big let down and for people that have never seen the original it’s just going to look like a Hong Kong action flick that has a chick that looks like she was taken out of the Matrix. Yawn.

For those that have no idea what the heck I’m talking about when I say that the original rocked in a special ‘kinky-leather-BSDM-kill-an-army-with-one-clip’ sort of way go read this. Think of it as your homework before you go to the movies this weekend. 

CulturePulp 041: The Not-So-Secret History of ‘Aeon Flux’?

The Cyberhand

Cyberhand

Amazing advancements are being made in the area of prosthetic limbs. I have always thought that if I were to lose a hand or a foot I’d want to enlist the aid of some of my friends that build robots to help come up with a mechanical solution to my dilemma. From what I’ve read about body replacements such as these its hard to do better than the old fashioned spring loaded claw/hook. I think that a real solution will only come when battery technology reaches the kilowatt per gram range, or a motor that uses picowatts of power yet still delivers foot pounds of torque are available.

These guys are getting there though. As you can see by the quoted article below, they have movement down:

Funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies initiative of the IST programme, the CYBERHAND project aims to hard wire this hand into the nervous system, allowing sensory feedback from the hand to reach the brain, and instructions to come from the brain to control the hand, at least in part…So far, the project is racking up an impressive list of achievements. It has a complete, fully sensitised five-fingered hand. The CYBERHAND prototype has 16 Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) made possible by the work of six tiny motors. Each of the five fingers is articulated and has one motor dedicated to its joint flexing for autonomous control. It features that miracle of evolution, the opposable thumb, so the device can perform different grasping action

 
They also have a working solution to the feedback needed to accuratly use a prosthetic hand. This is in the form of Thin Film Longitudinal IntraFascicular Electrodes. Lets hope that testing begins soon for this device, I’m sure that there are more than enough people who would be willing to test this for them. Next they should work on a prosthetic foot. It would have to be cheap enough to be given out by aid orginizations around the world.

[via Engadget and Slashdot ]

Cyberhand Project