Martin Molin might be an electronica musician, but he's an electronica musician who is fascinated by curiously analog instruments. As the frontman of Swedish band Wintergatan, Molin plays instruments such as the glockenspiel, traktofon, and theremin. But now, he's invented a wholly new type of musical instrument.
Meet the Musical Marble Machine: a Rube Goldberg-like device made out of Lego Technics. It is, perhaps, the analog equivalent of Black MIDI's dizzying onslaught of notes: a ridiculous, hand-cranked music box that sends 2,000 cascading steel marbles plunking down to play notes on a vibraphone at a dizzying speed and accuracy, while also thumping out a bass, a kick drum, a cymbal, and other instruments.
Molin and his band Wintergatan started building the Musical Marble Machine in 2014, with the intention of completing the instrument in just two months. Things soon got out of hand. The project exploded in scope, soon encompassing over 3,000 internal parts. In weekly updates Molin made on the band's YouTube page, he complained: "The closer the machine gets to being finished, the harder it gets to finish it."
Now, however, it's finally done. Even better, the song it plays is gorgeous, although that's no surprise: Although relatively unknown, Wintergatan's music has always been lovely. It's like a strange relative of Amelie's Yann Tiersen, played on some sort of electronic music box. If you've got Spotify, you should give them a listen. But listening to the Musical Marble Machine is the next best thing.
For American and European design lovers, shopping at Muji has long been the next best thing to living in Japan. But Muji's latest promotional stunt is taking that to the next level. Leveraging thousands of the store's designer products, Muji has created a scale model of Tokyo itself.
Directed by Japanese creative agency Dot By Dot, in collaboration with Tasko, the scale model of Tokyo recreates some of the Japanese capital's most famous sites using nothing but Muji's beloved stationery and lifestyle products.
For example, there's Shibuya Crossing, recreated in make-up compacts, ballpoint pens, iPhone cases, and striped socks. Tokyo Tower, meanwhile, is made out of a lotion container, a box of Muji emery boards, some clear plastic organizers, and more. There's the Tokyo Bridge, made of waste paper baskets and scotch tape dispensers. There's even a Temple, made from bamboo mats, chopsticks, and more. You can see exactly which Muji products make up the model here.
Muji's scale model of Tokyo will be on display in the company's Taipei store from March 5 to March 15. Then, it will travel to New York, where it will be on display at the new 5th Avenue store from March 19 to April 26. Anyone else tempted to show up and slap a big plastic Godzilla action figure, right in the middle?
There are two kinds of Americans: those who think Donald Trump says it like it is, and those who think that Donald Trump says it like a sputtering, sub-human gonad. No matter which camp you fall into, though, you might very well mistake the DeepDrumpf Twitter account for the real thing. Programmed by MIT's Bradley Hayes, DeepDrumpf leverages the power of neural networks to randomly generate tweets based on Trump's own bombastic, bloviating, bigoted speaking style!
A post-doc associate at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Hayes spends most of his days programming algorithms to make it safer and more productive for robots to work alongside humans. After catching lunch with some fellow CSAIL students about Donald Trump's statistically remedial way of expressing himself Hayes felt compelled to try feeding Trump's campaign speeches and tweets into a neural network to see if his style could be emulated by a computer.
"It didn't take that much work," admits Hayes, saying that he quickly started getting "crude" results that were "sort of like English, and very similar to political rhetoric." Just like Donald Trump's tweets! Deeming the resulting bot DeepDrumpf, a reference to both Donald Trump's ancestral surname and Google's DeepDream neural network platform, he plugged it into Twitter.
Here are just some of DeepDrumpf's tweets, which have a quality that is almost like what Donald Trump might smash out on a smartphone with his stubby, child-sized fingers after smoking some angel dust.
According to Hayes, neural network bots like DeepDrumpf can be used to simulate the structure and language of any presidential candidate. Trump's boorish communication makes him a natural fit for the project, even with a limited data set. "Of all the candidates, Trump uses the simplest, most repetitive language," Hayes says. "It really should take a lot more data to capture the complexity of a person who might become president."
What's next? Hayes says he hopes to start plugging other candidates' speeches into his Twitter bot, which is why he's already registered the DeepLearnBern Twitter account. The ultimate goal? "I'd love to get a tweet from Trump," Hayes admits. @RealDonaldTrump and @DeepDrumpf in a full-blown Twitter flame war! Just imagine the possibilities.
They say a standing desk can add a decade to your life. But if you're one of my fellow ticking time-bombs of nervous energy, even sitting in a chair could have some health benefits, too. Even better? With the right office equipment, your idle fidgeting can power your gadgets.
Moov is a chair from furniture designer Nathalie Teugels. When a rapidly vibrating fidgeter sits down on the Moov, it starts cranking out juice by harnessing the power of 288 piezoelectric crystals embedded in the frame, which generate electricity in response to pressure, as Core77 recently wrote.
The more a sitter jams, quavers, or shakes, the more juice the Moov pumps out of a USB port in the arm rest, which can be used to power an iPhone, an iPad, or any other gadget.
According to Teugels, the idea for the Moov came from her own experiences with ADHD. "My goal is to change negative ideas about people who cannot sit still into a positive approach by creating [useful] energy", she says.
As a bundle of raw nervous energy at the best of times, I'd love to buy the Moov. Sadly, though, the prototype is a one-off student project—at least for now. Too bad. If Ikea made this, I could generate my home's electricity for a month in the time it took to write this post.
Love it or hate it, email is a major part of our lives. For that, as well as the renaissance of the @ symbol, we have Raymond Samuel Tomlinson to thank. Tomlinson—who may have done more than anyone to change the way we work—died Friday. He was 74.
Tomlinson was a tech legend. After earning his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1965 at MIT, he began working on ARPANET, the early packet switching network funded by the Department of Defense that eventually evolved to become the technological foundation of the Internet. This work culminated when he invented ARPANET's first network mail client. Previously, it was possible for users on the same computer to send messages to each other, but not to other computers. After hacking some protocols, Tomlinson successfully sent the first email from one computer to another in late 1971 (it read: "QWERTYIOP.")
It's a testament to how hated email has become in the Slack age that many of the headlines about Tomlinson's death also highlight his role in popularizing the @ symbol. After languishing for centuries as an underused accounting symbol, the typographical curlicue was given a second life thanks to Tomlinson as a symbol of Internet identity.
Tomlinson downplayed his genius in choosing the @ symbol as the navel of a new digital communication medium. "I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but the at sign just makes sense," he wrote on his website in the early 1990s. "The purpose of the at sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). I used the at sign to indicate that the user was "at" some other host rather than being local." So maybe it wasn't genius. But serendipity is just as important to a pioneer, and the choice of the @ symbol had serendipity in spades.
Today, the @ symbol is used in everything: our email addresses, yes, but also our Twitter handles, our Snapchat usernames, our Slack replies, and more. That's why, even as the biggest and best Silicon Valley companies like Facebook, Slack, and Microsoft throw billions at the problem of killing of email, the @ symbol is likely to be Ray Tomlinson's enduring legacy. Email may be on its way out. But love for the @ symbol shows no signs of waning.
If you ride L.A.'s new Skyslide, there are a couple reasons you shouldn't look down.
The first? The glass-bottomed slide is installed 1,000 feet in the air on the side of Los Angeles' U.S. Bank Tower, overlooking a vertiginous drop that would make almost anyone sick. Two? Even if you've got a steady stomach for heights, the person who rode the slide before you may not have.
Plunging at an angle from the 70th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower, the Skyslide is made entirely of clear glass, one-and-half inches thick. Tourists who buy a ticket can ride it 45 feet along the side of the building down to the 69th floor. Created by glassmakers at M.Ludvik & Co, the Skyslide will open as part of the Gensler-designed Skyspace L.A. installation, California's tallest open air observation deck, which will offer 360-degree panoramic views of downtown L.A. to visitors come June 25.
Glass-bottom architectural attractions are nothing new. China has a suspension bridge made out of glass in Shiniuzhai Geopark, and there's a skywalk above the Grand Canyon. In London, developers at the Embassy Gardens have just built an 82 foot glass sky pool that visitors can use to swim laps between two separate towers.
So should you take a ride on the Skyslide? Well, that's up to you. Two weeks after it opened, China's new mountainside glass walkway cracked so badly it was evacuated. And while there have been no reports of cracks in the Embassy Garden glass sky pool, that glass is over 8 inches thick, compared to the Skyslide's mere 1.5 inches.
It should be strong enough, though. According to Michael Ludvik of Ludvik & Co, the Skyslide is made of four large panes of triple laminated hurricane glass (as opposed to smaller pieces of glass bolted together), an innovation made possible due to the recent availability of oversized glass fabrication technologies. Another thing that makes the Skyslide strong enough to support visitors' weight is the way those pieces of glass are connected to each other using "soft touch" components, which swivel just enough so that high stresses do not develop at the connection points. So chances are, no matter how big the slider, the Skyslide is probably safe.
Still, if you do opt to pay $25 for a ticket on the Skyslide? Prepare to hurl. But hey! At least in the case of hurlage the Skyslide should be easy to clean. After all, it slopes downhill.
They say one man's trash is another man's treasure. For photographer Paul Bulteel, Europe's super-efficient recycling plants offer an embarrassment of such riches. In Bulteel's new book, Cycle & Recycle, the Belgian photographer traveled to recycling plants across Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France to capture what he calls the "unreal aesthetics" of their strange and flotsam beauty.
Bulteel says he's always been fascinated with the relationship between humans and the urban environments they create—often entirely without intention. To him, there's no better way to illustrate how humans have accidentally transformed the environment than the disposal of trash. Belgium has a staggeringly efficient recycling program: The country recycles 80% of its total packaging waste and 41% of its plastic a year, compared to America's paltry 14%. But despite this, Bulteel found himself in awe of the scope and size of local waste collection sites—each a giant, self-contained world with its own fascinating design that almost no one ever gets to see.
So he started photographing them. Over the years, he has traveled to over 50 different waste management and recycling facilities across Europe, documenting a diverse range of domestic and industrial products that are collected and recycled or reused at these plants. Paper, glass, furniture, appliances, batteries, tires, even gypsum and latex—it seems there's a recycling plant for everything we throw out.
Through Bulteel's lens, each recycling plant is an alien world to itself, whether made up of crushed mountains of pastel car wrecks, compressed cubes of pink and orange tubing, or rainbow hills of shredded foam rubber. The point of this exercise is not to just "take pictures of trash." Instead, argues Bulteel, there's great beauty in recycling. The pictures in Cycle & Recycle are rarely depressing. Even his most mundane shots have splashes of color, or a satisfying geometric purity. These images refuse to wallow in the excess of humankind's wastefulness, and instead, offer a glimpse at the sheer scale and efficiency of what humans can accomplish when we tackle a problem head-on.
Paul Bulteel's Cycle & Recycle can be purchased directly from the publisher here.
Back before operating systems like Windows and Mac OS became popular, we interacted with computers through the command line. In a way, it was the original chatbot: a little blinking cursor on a black terminal screen, allowing us to tell our computers what to do in plain text. Command lines had the advantage of being precise, powerful, and incredibly quick—if you knew what you were doing—but they had the disadvantage of being obscure, too. Instead of just pointing a cursor at an icon, you needed to know exactly how to phrase your command for it to do anything at all.
It's this obscurity that eventually killed off the command line for all but neckbeard Unix superusers. But with his new startup, Prompt, Tom Hadfield thinks it's time to bring command lines back—not as the way we talk to our computers exactly, but as the way we talk to the thousands of services we use on an every-day basis. Prompt aspires to let you do that without ever opening the corresponding apps. How? Just by texting.
On its surface, Prompt is incredibly simple. First, you sign up through SMS, the official Prompt website, or by installing a Prompt bot in Slack. Once that's done, you interact with Prompt by sending it commands. For example, typing "@uber from Penn Station to LaGuardia Airport" would order a car to pick you up to drop you at the airport. Type "@nest 73" and Prompt will turn up your heat if you have a Nest thermostat. "@flightstats AA21" would get you the status for American Airlines flight 21; "@hue" will turn on and off your Philips Hue bulbs; "@showtimes" will tell you what movies are playing near you, and so on.
At launch, there are more than three dozen commands supported on Prompt, with a dozen more available soon (including Viber, Skype, Line, WhatsApp, and—this will be dangerous—the ability to quickly order a pizza from Domino's via a simple text). But Prompt is also easily extensible, says Hadfield. "Users can build a chatbot in 30 minutes with 30 lines of code, using our developer tools for authentication, API integration, and language parsing," Hadfield says. The eventual goal, he says, is for the number of Prompt commands to match the scope of the App Store.
No one can say Hadfield isn't aiming big with Prompt. But why would anyone want to text Prompt for directions home or order an Uber with a text instead of opening the native apps?
According to Hadfield, the idea for Prompt came out of his last startup, a human-powered SMS assistant called Fetch. Although Hadfield was never able to find a scalable business model for Fetch, he discovered that when people know exactly what they want to do, they find text interfaces quicker and easier than opening an app. For example, he points out that using the Domino's app to order a pizza involves clicking through seven screens, even if you already know what you want. When Domino's support comes to Prompt, though, you can order in seconds by sending "@dominos large Hawaiian" over SMS.
Prompt only saves time, then, if you've got a crystal-clear idea about what you want to do. So, really, it's not so different from its predecessor. What the command line was to Linux, Windows, and OS X power users—a quick, efficient way to get a computer to do precisely what you want them to do—Prompt aims to be for today's power users of Google, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, your thermostat, your sprinkler system, you name it. The idea is to break the functionality of your favorite products and services free from their walled-in apps, which is why Prompt doesn't even have an app.
Just like the command line, though, Prompt's biggest barrier to entry is syntax. Although simply typing in a command (like @uber) and hitting "enter" will get you instructions, commands entered in Prompt tend to fall over if you don't type them exactly right. That's especially frustrating on smartphones, where on-screen keyboards and autocorrect can wreak havoc with Prompt's super-specific vocabulary. Hadfield says he hopes Prompt will get better at understanding humans over time, even when they make mistakes. "We are building out the natural language processing to make the commands less brittle," he says.
From Facebook to Quartz, chatbots are the new hotness in UI/UX design right now, so Prompt is in good company.
What makes it different, though, is it's not just a chatbot—it unites them, while also giving a text interface to apps and services that aren't chatbots at all. In Tolkein-esque terms? It's the one chatbot to rule them all. Sign up for Prompt here.
All those designs had one thing in common, though: They were designed for humans. And while Nendo had tinkered with a pet bed once, the studio is branching out to design a whole line for dogs. The Japanese design house has just announced a collection of pet accessories designed for small apartments called Cubic Pet Goods.
Most products designed for dogs and cats are plush, round, and cute. Nendo doesn't have any problem with plush and cute—but round is a problem, because our homes are made up of straight lines and square angles. That means that something as simple putting a round dog bed in the corner, or, for that matter, storing it away, leads to a lot of wasted space.
Nendo's answer to this problem is to think square. Although still plenty cute and plush, the new line is all about space efficiency: a plush square dog house with a top that can be squashed down to form a bed; a square-shaped food bowl with contour lines inside that make it easy to check how much food or water your dog is consuming; a soft toy that's almost like Tetris for dogs, folding up into a small cube when it's not in use; and a ball with square holes that store kibble, creating an engaging challenge for playful dogs to shake out.
Sadly, like many of Nendo's designs, the Cubic Pet Goods line is only available in Japan for right now. Good news for Akitas and Shiba Inus, but design-loving Golden Retriever or Black Labs and their American owners are out of luck.
The intersection of drones and street art is nothing new, but these experiments have been complicated and hard to control: more flying tech vandals than aerial artists. But the Flying Pantograph from MIT is different. It makes writing on walls from a room or even miles away as easy as using a pen. But its creators think it's good for a lot more than just street art.
Created by Sang-won Leigh and Harshit Agrawal, two students working within MIT's Fluid Interfaces Group, the Flying Pantograph takes its name from a device first created in 1603. Pantographs use mechanical linkages to duplicate (or scale up) a drawing, mimicking the motions of a human artist to copy their lines on a different piece of paper. The Flying Pantograph takes this concept, and adds a drone to the mix. Using a regular pen on a standard piece of paper—and some motion tracking tech—the Flying Pantograph will reproduce your drawing at any scale you want, wherever it's flying.
Right now, that's just across the room, but Leigh and Agrawal say there's no reason the Flying Pantograph's tether needs to be that short: It could just as easily replicate a drawing across the city, country, or world. That could open the door to some interesting guerilla street art. If police think catching Banksy is hard now, imagine how hard it will be when he's a world away from the drone doing his street art.
The duo envision the Flying Pantograph having many more applications than just street art, though. Using more than one Flying Pantograph, multiple artists could collaborate on a piece in real time without even being in the same room. With some tweaking, the Flying Pantograph could even have applications for the disabled, too: For example, someone who doesn't have the use of their arms could control a Flying Pantograph to write something on a whiteboard using eye-tracking.
The Flying Pantograph isn't quite that sophisticated yet. In its earliest iteration, it uses a motion-tracking system to watch what the pen is doing, and then send commands to a laptop over Wi-Fi. This, in turn, controls the drone—which has to battle air currents to recreate the motions, creating an often shaky version of the original. There's no reason it couldn't be programmed to accept other kinds of input methods, though: eye-tracking, EEGs, and even VR controllers are all possible. Leigh and Agrawal also hope its future drawings will be accurate through the use of more sophisticated drones, and imagine giving users the ability to add stylistic "filters" to their drawings. Draw like Picasso? The Flying Pantograph could turn it into a Da Vinci.
Ultimately, say Leigh and Agrawal, the project is all about experimenting with technology that allows artists to help escape their biological limits and produce wholly unique, machine-assisted works of art. "One of the most innate things a human can do to be creative is draw," says Agrawal. "If our creativity is going to escape our biological limitations, finding new ways seems like a natural extension."
Video games aren't really much fun anymore, digital media designer Peter Buczkowski says. While in decades past, games could be completed over the course of a few lazy Saturdays on the couch, many games today are full-time jobs: an endless grind of unlockables, achievements, levels, marginally better equipment, and experience points. They're like "never ending to-do lists," says Buczowski. "One just wants to finish."
If video games these days feel like working the assembly line, reasons Buczkowski, why shouldn't they play like it too? That's the idea behind Current Times, an analog controller that's inelegant by design, dividing the labor of a single-player game into something that can only be accomplished by 21 people at once.
Resembling a switchboard, the Current Times control box has all the functionality of an Xbox controller and can be used with the same games. What makes it different is that it's been redesigned to be particularly anti-ergonomic. Every button has been broken out into its own separate clicker. So if you were playing Street Fighter II, one controller would move forward. Another would move back. Still another would kick, another would jump, and so on.
That means playing even the first level of Super Mario Bros. with the controller requires about as much as teamwork, coordination, and assembly as putting together an automobile. That's also where the name Current Times comes from—it rifs off of Charlie Chaplin's 1936 comedy film about assembly line workers, Modern Times.
"My idea was to use division of labor, one of the most common practice of the industrial world, and apply it on computer games," explains Buczkowski. "Like on an assembly line, every input becomes one small part of the complete process. Each player is an expert in their individual task, without a bond to the end product, which is the finished game."
With everyone in the design world currently obsessed with the gamification of work, here's a nice (literal) analog: the workification of gaming. Check out more of Buczkowski's work here.
With its focus on learning through playful discovery rather than instruction, the Montessori method is widely hailed as one of the most effective ways of teaching kids. But can you use the Montessori method to teach kids to code?
Primo Toys co-founders Matteo Loglio and Filippo Yacob think so. They've created Cubetto, a four-wheeled wooden robot with a smiley face, who is programmed to navigate his environment not by typing code into a computer, but through the placement of brightly colored blocks.
Cubetto comes in three parts: the robot, a programming board, and a game board. The programming board has an Arduino in it, which communicates with the Cubetto robot over Bluetooth to move across the game board. Sort of like a shape sorting board, the way you program the Cubetto is by slotting different color blocks into the board: red to move forward, blue to turn left, yellow to turn right, and green is the function key for loops and subroutines. Kids ages three to seven "play" with the Cubetto by trying to program a path from one part on the board to another.
In a lot of ways, Cubetto is like a more sophisticated and attractive version of Robot Turtles, an analog board game that tries to teach kids to code. Both aim to teach children the logic of coding without them having to know the machine language of programming. But while Robot Turtles requires an adult to interpret a child's code, Cubetto's robot moves itself, allowing children to discover coding without a grown-up's instruction.
That's where Montessori comes in, say Loglio and Yacob. By allowing a kid to discover programming through play without an adult's direct instruction, Cubetto fulfills many of the criteria of the Montessori method. It's non-prescriptive, in that it allows children to solve problems within the world they create. It's child-centric: All kids need is a nudge to understand "blocks" = "actions" and they can take it from there. Cubetto is also designed so that many kids in a class or a pre-school can pool their knowledge to come up with a solution one child alone might not understand; in other words, cooperative, not combative. And finally, it's autodidactic: Kids learn the principals of coding through trial and error, not instruction.
Montessori is not the only educational method Cubetto piggybacks off of. Logo—the educational programming language for kids first created at MIT in 1967—was also a big inspiration for the Cubetto team. If you grew up in the '80s, you might have learned Logo in computer class, programming a turtle to draw on your screen. "In many ways, the Cubetto Playset and its tangible coding language are a physical, and much simpler representation of Logo, specifically aimed at a younger audience in pre-literacy," says Yacob.
Will Cubetto help your child land a job at Google straight out of preschool? Probably not, but what it will do is help children develop an intuitive understanding of coding logic, which they can then apply when they're older to any platform or language they want.
You can pre-order a Cubetto playset starting at around $195 here.
Tripling down on its reputation as the least boring architecture museum in the world, the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., has tapped James Corner Field Operations—the firm behind New York's High Line—to transform its 19th-century Great Hall into a crystal wonderland, stylized in all-caps: ICEBERGS.
It's all-caps for a reason. ICEBERGS is all about trying to simulate the intimidating majesty of walking amongst cracking mountains of ice as they smash together in rough Arctic seas. Although they'll be made of scaffolding and polycarbonate paneling instead of millennia-old ice, the largest iceberg will be over 56 feet tall, reaching the Great Hall's third-story balcony.
You won't just walk among icebergs, though. You'll also swim under them. The first story of the Great Hall will be "below" sea level view, allowing visitors to stare up at the icebergs floating above them, and they'll be surrounded by caves and grottoes and even an undersea bridge. A platform above the hall, meanwhile, will let visitors see the icebergs from above while they snack on snow cones (natch).
"ICEBERGS invokes the surreal underwater-world of glacial ice fields," said James Corner, founder and director of James Corner Field Operations, in a statement. "Such a world is both beautiful and ominous given our current epoch of climate change, ice-melt, and rising seas. The installation creates an ambient field of texture, movement, and interaction, as in an unfolding landscape of multiples, distinct from a static, single object."
This is hardly the first time the National Building Museum has gone weird and wonderful with its summer exhibitions. Last year, they unveiled The Beach, in which Brooklyn-based architecture studio Snarkitecture turned the inside of the museum into indoor beach using astroturf and 1 million translucent, recyclable plastic balls that mimic what it's like to swim in the ocean. And before that, the Bjarke Ingels Group made the museum a labyrinth any minotaur could be proud of.
ICEBERGS will open at the National Building Museum on July 2, and continue until September 5, 2016. Just in time to beat some truly awful summer heat.
Although music is a universal language, composing it is not. In other words, while almost everyone enjoys music, comparatively few people actually understand it. Google's latest experiment wants to help change that. Check out the Chrome Music Lab, an online toy box that helps explain the science and terminology of music in a way that anyone can understand.
Created by a team of programmers and some of the visualizers responsible for Google's interactive music doodles overseen by Alexander Chen, the Chrome Music Lab spans 12 separate web toys, each a colorful, cartoony play on a different musical concept. One toy teaches you about rhythm by letting you program the beats of some monkeys. Another gives you a color wheel to explore arpeggios. Still another simulates the way that music moves like water. There's also a lesson on musical oscillation, thanks to a web app featuring a Patrick Starfish-like character, which lets you change frequency by dragging your mouse or finger across the screen. There's even a toy to learn some piano chords, or see what the sound of a flute looks like in as a heat map in a spectrogram.
Hey, I learned something, and I'm admittedly a musical dummy: Who knew that the notes in a piano chord weren't all next to each other? (Everyone, probably.) The Chrome Music Lab was created for Music in Our Schools Month, an annual March celebration aiming to promote high-quality music education since 1973. It works on both desktop, smartphones, and tablets. Check it out here.
Especially for those of us who snoozed through 11th-grade physics class, understanding particle physics can be challenging, to say the least. But Symmetry Magazine—a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication covering advanced physics—has us dummies covered. They've just launched the Snow Fall of button cute physics primers: the interactive ABCs of Particle Physics.
"We know particle physics can seem daunting at times, but everything's more fun to learn when it rhymes. So we're breaking it down, letter by letter, with hopes that you'll understand physics much better," writes Fermilab's Lauren Biron. With the help of Chris Smith, an illustrator at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the pair explain particles like the cryostat, Higgs boson, joules, quarks, and more in a way that kindergarteners (or the aforementioned physics class snoozers) can understand.
On the web, the ABCs of Particle Physics animates as you scroll, bringing Smith's adorably anthropomorphic particles and physic concepts to life as you move down the page. It's also available as a non-animated website, and even as a downloadable PDF, so you can lull the future particle physicist in your life to sleep by reading it at bedtime. Check it out here.
A band used to be four guys on instruments; a song used to be written, note after note. But that's just not true anymore: Music isn't just increasingly performed on computers, it's algorithmically written in code. So what does making music mean in the 21st century?
To give one possible answer to that question, Deloitte Digital teamed up with Dave and Gabe, an interactive installation studio, to create the ARC. Debuting today at SXSW, the ARC consists of five newly invented musical instruments, each of which controls a different dimension of a totally generative musical soundscape.
In appearance, the ARC looks like the mixing deck Daft Punk played in Tron Legacy. There are five different "instruments," but these aren't conventional instruments: They don't actually produce any sounds. Rather, they interface with different qualities of the music being played by the ARC. Although all the music is digital, one big goal in the creation of the ARC was to make the instruments feel physical and analog. "We just feel like touch screens are kind of played out," says Deloitte Digital's Alan Schulman.
So instead of using a tablet or smartphone, users of the ARC explore physical affordances. An eight-inch crystal ball can be rolled to change the harmonic texture of the piece; a set of glowing glass rods can be slid up and down to fade tracks in and out; another interface allows users to control rhythm by rotating and orbiting hands, and so on. The idea is to restore some tactile sense to music.
The musical composition all these instruments control is totally generative. In other words, it's more code than recording. "It doesn't have a fixed length at all, it just happens," says Gabe Liberti of Dave and Gabe. "It's not really a song; more a living ecosystem, or an environment. It's like a forest. It's alive, and it interacts with itself." But that's not to say that the composition doesn't have discrete parts.
Although the performance itself is algorithmically generated, it is still based on melodies and rhythms composed by André Anjos of RAC. Which is another aspect of this: not only is the ARC in some aspects like playing producer to RAC, Anjos himself will actually be at SXSW, dropping by occasionally to help attendees spin the ARC.
The ARC will be open for attendees to experiment with as part of Deloitte Digital's SXSW Interplay Lab, which also contains two other interactive installations: sonic swings and glowing celestial orbs. The ARC, however, is the main attraction. If you're at SXSW, you can see it today from noon to 6 p.m., and on Saturday from noon until 5:30 p.m.
Photos: Marcus De Paula, Deloitte Digital. Video: Jeff Osborne
If you're a parent, your stroller can be both a blessing and a curse, especially when traveling. Sure, it makes it easier to get your pudgy little infant and 50-odd pounds of accompanying baby paraphernalia from a to b. But strollers are also nightmarishly big and bulky, making them especially difficult to manage on planes and public transportation, as well as to store in small city apartments.
Available today, the Pockit from infant accessory brand gb is a minimalist stroller that aims to solve those problems. Billing itself as the world's smallest folding stroller, the Pockit collapses to about the size (11.8 x 7.1 x 13.8 inches) and weight (10 pounds) of a coffee table art book, small enough to fit under a plane seat, or even slide into a large tote. According to the manufacturer, it's still strong enough to support children older than six months up until they weigh 55 pounds.
Of course, with strollers, how small one folds is only part of what makes the design good. The other part is how quickly and easily it collapses. The Pockit folds in up to three movements, and unfolds with up to a couple flicks of the wrist. We say "up to" because the Pockit's design allows you to make a trade-off: You can opt to fold it to be slightly less compact in order to make it easier to deploy, or compress it down to its smallest size, adding another motion when you unfold it. Either way, even if you have a squirming, caterwauling toddler in your arms, it should still be fairly easy to flick open the Pockit.
To achieve its small form factor, the Pockit wasn't designed totally without compromise, but not as much as you might think. Although the canopy of the stroller isn't going to cover as much of your baby's face as a conventional stroller, it still is enough to afford some shade. Likewise, while moms who practically live out of the back of their baby's stroller won't be able to make the Pockit their day-to-day buggy, it still has a basket and a back pocket for storage.
The Pockit's design first debuted in 2014, and went on to win the iF Gold Award. It's now available to purchase from Babies 'R' Us for $249.99. A little expensive for a stroller, especially one that many parents would use mostly use for travel, but then again, how many other strollers can fit into your bag?
The best 007 movies starred more than James Bond, a super villain, and a Bond girl. They also starred the breathtaking sets of Ken Adam—who did more than anyone to establish the look of the 007 universe over the course of seven films. The Hollywood production designer, who also created the look of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Dr. Strangelove's iconic War Room, died at age 95 last week, theNew York Times reports.
Born in Berlin in 1921, Adam was inspired to go into set design after falling in love with German expressionist films, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He later studied architecture at University College London, then the Bartlett School with an eye to enter set design, which he successfully did starting as a draughtsman working on the 1948 film, This Was A Woman.
Dr. No, 1962Columbia Pictures
Adam's first job as a production designer was on the 1957 Jacques Tourneur film, Night of the Demon, an eerie film based upon M.R. James's story Casting the Runes that still routinely gets voted one of the best horror movies of all time. But it was his work creating the exotic locations of the James Bond films starting at 1962's Dr. No that cemented Adam's fame. He designed the lairs and locales of James Bond's best adventures, including the inside of Fort Knox in Goldfinger, the space station in Moonraker, and the volcano lair in You Only Live Twice.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964Sony/Columbia Industries Inc.
Adam also routinely worked with Stanley Kubrick. He created the triangular War Room in Dr. Strangelove, a set that Stephen Spielberg once claimed was the greatest movie set of all time. He later worked with Kubrick again on 1976's Barry Lyndon, which won Adam an Oscar. He was also asked by Kubrick to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Adam turned the job down, saying that because of the team of technical and scientific advisors on board, "[t]here was no room for my imagination."
Later credits include 1994's The Madness of King George, 1993's Addams Family Values, and 1999's The Out-Of-Towners. He even has a credit as production designer on the 2004 James Bond game, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. Asked about what excited him about his work, Adam once said: "As a production designer, you offer a form of escapism that is often more exciting than reality." Well into his eighties, he lived his life to put those words into practice.
Escape into some of the exciting worlds Adam helped create in the slide show above.
Gillis Lundgren, one the most important designers of the 20th century, has died at 86, The Washington Post reports. But there's a good chance you've never heard his name before.
IKEA
Lundgren designed Ikea's logo, although that's not the only reason why you should know him. He also designed the minimalist Billy bookcase, which Ikea produces at a staggering rate of 15 units per minute. In a career that lasted over 60 years, the former head of design created more than 200 designs for Ikea.
Yet ultimately, what earns Lundgren his title as one of the most important designers of the 20th century, is that he pioneered flat-pack, ready-to-assemble furniture, an innovation that is hard to overstate.
In 1943, 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad started Ikea as a mail-order business selling pens and nylon stockings by mail. By 1948, the company began selling furniture, but it was not the sort of furniture Ikea sells today. Rather, Kamprad sold chairs, tables, and more, produced and assembled by local manufacturers. By 1951, Kamprad was selling enough of these by mail that he had put together the first Ikea catalog. The furniture was big and bulky, making it expensive and difficult to ship.
In 1953, Lundgren joined Ikea as a catalog manager, after studying at the Malmo technical college. Three years later, he was tasked with delivering a new, leaf-shaped table called the Lovet to a nearby photo studio so it could be shot for an upcoming catalog. But he got frustrated trying to fit the table into his small post-war car. "When I looked at how we might keep a large number of these tables at our low price,"he once said."I thought: 'Why not take off the legs?'"The rest was history.
IKEA
Lundgren always admitted that he was not the inventor of flat-pack furniture. A fellow Swede, Fiolke Ohlsson, patented a ready-to-assemble chair in 1949. Lundgren's legacy was in popularizing flat-pack. He became such a tireless advocate for flat-pack furniture that he soon convinced Kamprad to make it the cornerstone of the fledgling furniture maker's business model.
Going flat-pack uniquely positioned Ikea to grow from a relatively small business operating out of the Swedish countryside to a multinational empire making over $30 billion a year. First, it made Ikea's furniture more affordable than competitors, since the company was offloading the assembly process to buyers. It also meant that Ikea stores could keep more furniture in stock than its competitors, since only show floor models needed to be stocked fully assembled. Third, it made Ikea furniture easier to transport, not just for consumers, but in bulk. Ikea could ship 10 times as many flat-pack desks, tables, or bookcases as competitors, for almost the same amount of gas. Finally, it encouraged Ikea's designers to embrace a clean, minimalist, geometric aesthetic, which the company still pursues today. Would so-called Swedish design really look the way it looks today if not for flat-pack?
Today, everyone knows Lundgren's work, even if they don't know his name. As for flat-pack? It's taken over the design world, not just in furniture, but in architecture, disaster relief, sporting goods, and more. There's even video games about flat-pack. Not a bad design legacy for a guy who just wanted to fit a table in his trunk.
Nothing kills conversation more quickly than pulling out your phone to check your calendar for your next appointment.
Enter the Calendar Watch, by What? Watch. Now on Kickstarter, it looks like a finely made mechanical watch, but pulls in appointments from your smartphone's calendar and displays them subtly on the watch face. Hours of the day in which you have meetings are marked off with dark slices. So to keep track of your appointments, all you need to do is glance down at your watch. It also alerts you with vibrations. No awkward interruptions required.
Functionally, the way the Calendar Watch manages to track your calendar is by putting a low power E-ink display behind the colored piece of glass that makes up the watch face, and pairing it to a Bluetooth radio. Then you pair it with an app on your smartphone, and you're off to the races. That's it.
Contrast that with most smart watches, which behave like a smartphone on your wrist. The Calendar Watch doesn't count your steps, or let you pay for something, or let you check-in on Foursquare, or anything else your Apple Watch can do. In fact, the Calendar Watch's "smarts" are so simple, you'll probably be reticent to call it a smartwatch at all. And that's exactly what makes it clever. The Calendar Watch takes the one thing that watches do better than any other gadget—keeping track of time—and makes it even better. It's also a convenient way of minding the broad strokes of your day—for instance, a watch face that's overrun by dark slices signals a meeting-heavy day.
Of course, the Calendar Watch doesn't reveal anything about a meeting beyond the fact that you have one, so you still have to pull out your phone to find out what and where it is. But that's easier to do once you've received the initial signal that it's time to wrap up and move onto the next appointment.
The Calendar Watch was designed by Japanese art director Masashi Kawamura, whom Fast Company put on our 2012 Most Creative People list, and Italian industrial designer Umberto Onza. You can preorder a Calendar Watch starting at around $265 here.
