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keeping track of the Sun
As mentioned previously, I’ve built my tracking mirrors on top of stripped down moving head lights. These mirrors follow the sun across the sky, reflecting the suns light onto a static mirror (what I am calling a target mirror) located in ACCA’s foyer. When installed at ACCA they hang off the side of the building like…
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going a little crazy
I’m making a master control box for the moving mirrors. This will allow me to turn them on and off individually. The control box will sit upstairs in Chunky Move’s plant room. While installing the switches I lost one of the rear mounting washers. As a result the middle switch sits slightly higher then the…
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solar forge
Whenever I get on the internet to research this project I tend to end up at a project like this. The Solar Forge by Tom Riley. There are no shortage of DIY solar collectors on the internet and there is definitely something exciting about watching a piece of 2 by 4 spontaneously burst into flames. I’m…
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sun in ACCA
While ACCA gives a good impression of being completely windowless there are a few places where light enters the building. I set up cameras and took some time-lapse video. This video shows the sun moving through the kitchen space at ACCA. It was filmed on 14th January from 9:00am to 3:15pm. There is direct…
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the Crosley/Hallstrom IcyBall
I’ve been trying to decide what to do with the sunlight I plan to collect. While searching for inspiration I came across the IcyBall, an early refrigeration unit that is powered by heat. (image from Crosley Automobile Club) This ingenious device was developed simultaneously in North America and Australia and sold during the 1920s and…
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my sun machine
While the thought of power tools screaming full-tilt across the ACCA forecourt is compelling, the challenge of bringing light into the gallery has begun to capture my imagination. There is a beautiful work by Olafur Eliasson called Your Sun Machine where Eliasson removes a circular section of the gallery roof and allows the sun (and presumably other…
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Electric Dream Car 123 version 2
I’ve blogged about this amazing vehicle before, but it’s worth revisiting because Greg Zanis and sons have made some progress. The Dream Car 123 now has GOLD TRIM, neon lighting and 80 lead-acid batteries, while retaining the original pyramid form factor, single person occupancy, and bullet proof Plexiglas. Greg has a new video and is looking for…
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Bees have Face Recognition
Last week I was stung on the face by a bee. Sadly, the bee died. I am still going strong. Image credit: Robert W. Matthews, University of Georgia, Bugwood.org Had the bee survived, and had I given it some kind of sugary reward, then according to scientists at the Université de Toulouse, it would have remembered…
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Freeze-Wait-Reanimate
Yesterday was the 43rd anniversary of the death and subsequent freezing of Dr. Bedford – the worlds first successful cryogenics patient (successful in the fact that he is still frozen and, unfortunately, also still dead). Quoting from the 1967 issue of Freeze-Wait-Reanimate, there may be some hope for reanimation in the distant future when reanimation techniques have…
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David Harvey on the right to the city.
David Harvey speaks about ‘the right to reshape the city in a different image’. He presents the city as a manifestation of our heart’s desire; ‘In remaking the city we remake ourselves. The question of what kind of city do we want cannot be divorced from questions about what kind of people do we want to…
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Some amazing web sites
I’m working on a new project (soon to be added to the main site). It involves some rather challenging web design, so I’ve been doing research – and in my travels I found this gem with the following company logo-thingy. I also found a pretty impressive site on miniature donkeys with an amazing ‘Lake applet effect’…
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A change has come.
I got this from Super Colossal but I’m so blown away by it I had to re-post. The robots.txt file for whitehouse.gov has changed. Yesterday it was: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /search Disallow: /query.html Disallow: /omb/search Disallow: /omb/query.html Disallow: /expectmore/search Disallow: /expectmore/query.html Disallow: /results/search Disallow: /results/query.html Disallow: /earmarks/search Disallow: /earmarks/query.html Disallow: /help Disallow:…
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It’s a MacWorld
By all accounts it’s been another stunning MacWorld despite the absence of Steve Jobs. The highlight for me was the announcement of ‘variable pricing’ for songs on the iTunes music store – simply amazing, what will they think of next? Still, not quite as amazing as last year: or the year before: thanks Rory
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Steve for CTO?
There is an absurd rumour floating around that Steve Jobs is going to be offered the soon-to-be-created position of Chief Technology Officer in Obama’s cabinet. As Dr. Macenstein points out, there are about 600,000 fat, Dorito-covered IT guys holed up in server closets across the country that are more qualified for the job. Clearly a stupid idea, will never…
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, all the Ewoks died
“Endor is a depopulated wasteland” and I’ve got to say that really makes my day. (Although I should mention the title for this post is a little misleading. Not all Ewoks were on Endor when the moon was destroyed and so it is conceivable that a small population of the fuzzy little fucks survived off-world. – regrettable, I know,…
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Van de Graaff
More High-Voltage science action. These Van de Graaff Generators were built by Robert J. Van de Graaff himself for MIT in the early 1930’s. Unlike the Tesla Coil, the Van de Graaff generator is an electrostatic machine which uses a moving belt to accumulate electrostatic voltages on a hollow metal sphere. The machines above were capable of producing 5,000,000 volts and were designed to accelerate…
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Death Ray
I just fell down the rabbit hole that is Nikola Tesla; inventor of radio, AC current distribution, remote controlled vehicles, and the DEATH RAY (actually Tesla called it the “Peace Ray” but that didn’t catch on). There’s a bit of controversy about whether it actually existed, most sane people think not, most nut bags with an internet connection and…
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another Radiohead remake
If you’ve seen the Radiohead video for House of Cards you probably know it was ‘filmed’ using a collection of 3D laser scanners. What you may not know is that Radiohead have released the scan data and Processing code used to produce the video. What would anyone want with that? Well you could use it…
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E.A.T.
I was googling E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology when I came across this collaboration for the Expo ’70 Pepsi Pavilion in Osaka, Japan. The outside of the building was covered by a water vapour cloud sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya. The dome shaped objects in the foreground are six-foot high moving sculptures by Robert…
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Curitiba, Brazil
I just listened to an interview with Jaime Lerner (transcript here), president of the International Union of Architects and 3 time mayor of Curitiba. He has many insightful things to say about cities as instruments for change. What struck me, in our current climate of 2020 and 2030 plans, was his three principles for change: keep it simple,…
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NARCOA
Sometimes using the internet feels a bit like that movie cliché where a black van pulls up and a character gets dumped out onto the pavement. Your dazed, you have no idea how you got there, yet things seem vaguely familiar. It was like that today when I found myself on the North American Railcar Operators…
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John Seely Brown
John Seely Brown was Chief Scientist at Xerox for many years and the Director of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1990 – 2000. Some amazing stuff came out of PARC, including the Macintosh personal computer – John has something to say on that towards the end of this video. It’s a long video (almost…
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I feel… small
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar made a web based collaborative art piece in 2005 titled We Feel Fine. I remember hearing about it at the time, but I’ve only just gone and checked it out. The project, located at www.wefeelfine.org presents a database of feelings, captured automatically from blog posts. Essentially the system searches for the phrase “I…
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Airships are our future
I’ve just been reading a post on we make money not art with an interesting comment on the “illusion of progress”. The post quotes architect Usman Haque and points out that the train from Portlaoise (Ireland) to Dublin took 51 minutes with steam engine in 1928, in 2006 it takes 55 minutes. 90 years, 4 minutes late.…
