flight assembled architecture
The ↑ETH Zurich‘s project ↑Flying Machine Enabled Construction … absolutely creepy :)
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Category Archives: hardware
why technologies fail
Boingboing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker has written a fine column for the New York Times Magazine called ‘↑Why your car isn’t electric,’ investigating the question ↑why some technologies fail, and others succeed. For a deeper understanding of the matter at hand and … Continue reading →
what is that?
zeph’s pop culture quiz #45 What is the large mechanical contraption in the picture everybody is staring at? In which movie does it appear and what does it do within the plot of that movie? Just leave a … Continue reading →
harper goff’s nautilus
Just recently we heard that ↵the mash still is safe and sound at the Smithsonian—now there’s even more comforting news. The original model of ↵Captain Nemo’s submarine ‘Nautilus’ designed by ↑Harper Goff and used in ‘↑20,000 Leagues Under The Sea‘ … Continue reading →
the mash still
After the ↵infamous Stim-U-Lax [and after just recently having spoken of ↵wonderful contraptions] here’s another piece of weird technology from ↑M*A*S*H: ↑the still! Following the end of production on M*A*S*H in January of 1983, 20th Century-Fox donated the O.R. set … Continue reading →
wonderful lego contraption
Lego of course is predestined for constructing ↑Rube Goldberg machines, and there are quite some fine specimen in existence, but ↑Akiyuky‘s beautiful creation ↑featured at gizmodo is as fantastic as it is gigantic. [There are bigger ones, but they … Continue reading →
tommy flowers’ diary
At least parts of the personal diary of ↑Thomas Harold Flowers (1905-1998) soon will be on display at ↑The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park, ↑reported the BBC two days ago. Flowers was crucial in constructing ↑Colossus—for the … Continue reading →
engine john’s goggles
Just last week I had my students discuss in class Alex ‘↑Rex‘ ↑Golub‘s excellent ethnography-based article ‘↓Being in the World (of Warcraft)‘ (2010). One of the points Rex powerfully makes is that it isn’t ever more realistic (or: naturalistic) graphics … Continue reading →
difference engine day
From the ↑Charles Babbage biography at ↑The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive (University of St Andrews, Scotland): Babbage is without doubt the originator of the concepts behind the present day computer. The computation of logarithms had made him aware of … Continue reading →
fun times ahead
According to Kaspersky ↵Stuxnet has ↑an heir. Here are two snippets from Wired’s report on it—mind the rhetorics: “It’s pretty fantastic and incredible in complexity,” said Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab. […] “It took us … Continue reading →