headgear

Honoured with the James Dyson Award for innovative design, Isis Shiffer’s EcoHelmet is a fully recyclable, collapsing bicycle helmet made of paper that folds flat for easy transport. An elegant solution to an obvious problem, these helmets are cheap to produce so riders wouldn’t be put off in donning one (especially for urban bike-sharing schemes or ad-hoc, unexpected jaunts) but durable and robust enough to provide real protection.  Be sure to visit the link up top to find out more about Shiffer’s design and review other Dyson Award laureates from years past.

archival quality

While there’s certainly something worthy in the slower (see how impatient we’ve become even though we’re on the cusps of a virtual utopia by any standards of the past) methods of conservation and reinvigorating pre-digital albums of photographs, this new application that allows one scan old pictures effortlessly seems pretty revolutionary. One is not taking a picture of a picture precisely but rather an enhanced image scan that finds the edges automatically and corrects for distortion and blur. I detect a weekend project that we’ve been meaning to get to for some time.

eye-spy

The uncanny visual acuity of our friend the Mantis Shrimp (who’ve been blessed with a whole range of super powers including battle claws whose joust can create a sonic boom) could teach scientists how to make more advanced polarised lenses that could discriminate between the signatures of diseased and healthy tissue. Their compound eyes, described as hexnocular, allow the shrimp to communicate and flirt at a spectrum that no other creatures are privy to are inspiring engineers to replicate the optics which may lead to remarkable early detection of cancer and dementia, able to study what goes on in organs and neurons just with a superficial glance.

helen van patterson patton

From Nellie Oleson of Little House on the Prairie fame to Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt, Rebecca Jennings (via Kottke) presents an interesting examination and appreciation in defense of the oft maligned and neglected “Little Fancy Bitch Æsthetic.”
Usually inserted as foils to highlight how good and noble the protagonist is in comparison—without necessarily being a true villain and antagonising the main character—and never as a character to emulate. But there’s certainly more going on than just this surface prissiness or manipulative scheming and one has to wonder how it feels, beyond the fourth wall, to have been created and introduced as a plot device of deflected glory, like a sidekick that embodies the author’s repressed frilliness that’s really anything but frivolous. Can you name any more Little Fancy Bitch role-models?

time and tide

Via Colossal, we are treated to wonderful, modern and almost brutalist at times sandcastles of sculptor Calvin Seibert. Spending part of the summer beachcombing at Rockaway in New York, Seibert reflected on the nature of his temporary edifices and how their construction is a race against time that defies advanced planning and develops rather organically. Explore more of Seibert’s amazing geometric sculptures at the link above.

google doodle or quick draw mcgraw

We learn of another novel mentorship opportunity of machine-learning that we can all interact with the form of the experiment called Quick Draw from the search engine’s labs—thanks to the Presurfer. It’s a challenging few rounds of play with assignments that aren’t quite the easiest concepts to limn with a mouse but you should really give it a try—with the Control Voice shouting out guesses as you sketch like celebrity contestants on that television game show Win, Lose or Draw.
It always strikes me as a little strange to consider how—when engaging in this sort of crowd-sourced science, that we might be ultimately outwitting ourselves, but then again, one wouldn’t withhold wisdom from a fellow human. It’s quite a dilemma that were stumbling into. Relatedly, I noticed recently that the image search of Google has become a bit more literate of late: often I use it to search PfRC for pictures I can vaguely recall but have no idea what I saved them under and found if I typed in a colour—even if that had nothing to do with the filename but remembered that the background was purple, the query would yield what I was looking for. Also, I noticed without nudging that on my mobile device I could set not a temporal but rather a spatial reminder—like a shopping list that would go off when one’s in the supermarket. I wonder if those features, those talents came about all without the intervention of programmers and were the fruits of artificial intelligence. When that does happen, would we even realise it?

4x4

no bueno: a look at the evolution of the logo of a Tex-Mex-ish fast food chain via Super Punch

pleasure capsule: the pimped out Panthermobile, from the creator of KITT and the Bat Mobile, is finally street-legal—via Nag on the Lake

omoshirogara: the private propaganda kimonos en vogue from 1900 to 1945

ur-fascism: an examination of the key features of totalitarianism