Holding the telephone ready for use, a “third hand” of flexible steel leaves both the operator’s hands free to take notes during phone conversations. The spring arm holds the receiver to the ear and can be adjusted to the height and position of the user. The third hand was developed in Australia.
But even worse for artists: when the cost of distributing art goes up, the number of companies involved in it goes down. We all know what that looks like: the record industry, cable TV, the studio system. All systems where there's a buyer's market for art, where the big companies have artists over a barrel.
We live in an age in which more people can express themselves in more ways to more audiences than ever before. The majority of this expression is intimate, personal maunderings -- the half-spelled, quarter-grammatical newspeak adorning MySpace and Facebook pages. These are often intensely personal, with none of the self-conscious artifice that we've traditionally associated with "published work." By turning the personal into the public, an entirely new aesthetic is coming into being -- and a huge proportion of the invisible social interaction of a generation is being recorded forever. As Charles Stross notes, we are living at the end of "pre-history" -- the last days of a patchwork human history. Tomorrow's lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.
Paradoxically, it is this very feature that leads many artists to view these sites with suspicion and derision. A common refrain goes like this: "These sites are filled with pirated material and they know it. They're making money off our work, and the only 'redeeming' quality they have is that a bunch of idiots get to talk about their cats around the clock and around the world."
Could these sites be remade to prevent infringement, and if they could, what would that mean for free expression?
Alas, most of these designer shoeboxes are premium items, super-expensive. But today's expensive bespoke prototypes are tomorrow's el-cheapo homebrew projects.
When prefabricated houses become small enough, high-tech enough and weird enough to allow for mounting on a cliffside or over a lake, they may have gone a step (or a splash) too far. The Single Hauz, from Poland, offers cantilevered space for one atop a cement pole, and looks like a cross between a billboard and a scene from the Myst series.
If I were to make one general comment about the OLPC XO-1, it's that its mechanical design is brilliant. It's a fairly clean-sheet redesign of traditional notebook PC mechanics around the goal of survivability, serviceability, and robustness (then again, I've never taken apart any of the ruggedized notebooks out there). When closed up for "travel", all the ports are covered, and the cooling system is extremely simple so it should survive in dusty and dirty environments. Significantly, the port coverings aren't done with rubberized end caps that you can lose or forget to put on–they are done using the wifi antennae, and the basic design causes the user to swivel them back to cover the ports when they are packing up the laptop to go. That's thoughtful design.
Inside the room was a hand-written note.
The note said "You Found It!"
It turns out, the note explained, that the house was infested with "the worst types of mold including Stachybotrys, the so-called Toxic Black Mold," which can cause "respiratory bleeding" in infants.
The stunned homeowners, thinking they might be the victims of a weird hoax, hired an environmental engineer – only to discover that the problem was even worse than they thought; the house contained "elevated levels of several types of mold, including Aspergillus, Basidiospores, Chaetomiu, Curvularia, Stachybotrys and Torula."
The town's local news station calls this "the horrible secret of Number 6 Whitten Street."
Now, crack operative Matthew Fowler has penetrated the security perimeter around this facility with a hidden camera and smuggled out a reel of strategic photographs of the mall, including this (upside-down) map, which, incredibly, shows the location of the local Boots outlet and the Woolworth's store! With this kind of high-value intel, the Fareham Centre will be ours!
Agent Fowler has also provided us with a riveting walk-through video that reveals many key tactical elements of the structure, from the sort of chairs provided in the food court to the kind of tennis-shoes you need to wear if you want to blend in with the native population.
Tremble, Fareham Shopping Centre! I know not where you are, and care less, but still, you will be mine! Hahahahahahahaahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahaha!
Link to images,
Link to video
See also: UK mall bans grandparents for trying to photo their grandkids
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LC: What was in the books you drew as a kid?
NG: The same stuff I'm doing now, I'm pretty sure. Lots of monsters, lots of robots, lots of dinosaurs...
I don't think I've always wanted to be a cartoonist. I've always just been a cartoonist. I've always just been making little stories.
LC: Colonel Sweeto shows a magical candy land where the reigning monarch practices some vicious realpolitik. When I contacted you, I almost wondered if you lived in a far-away fantasy castle of your own.
NG: I wonder if most people have that impression. I love castles. I plan to live in one some day. It's not wrong that you have that impression.
I wish it were true.
About halfway home, the driver received an “urgent call” and told Lei that he would have to drop her off and turn back. He waived her fee, unloaded her luggage and helped her get another taxi.
When she returned home, Lei discovered that her notebook computer had been removed from her luggage and called police.
After a month-long investigation, police determined that the driver had hid somebody in the trunk specifically to steal luggage. Both the driver and the “trunk man” were arrested.
2. Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? I don’t have a clever comparative simile for this, because frankly you bags of meat will fuck bicycles if they’re laying down and not putting up a fight. Just stop it. There is no robot on Earth that wants to see a bag of meat with a small prong on the end approaching it with a can of WD-40 and a hopeful smile. And don’t get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat.
