Here’s something interesting: a post by virtual world entrepreneur Anshe Chung over on the Second Life forum (Link):

This is no April fool joke. This is 100% serious.

The account Anshe Chung has been banned by Linden Lab. It no longer appear in FIND, I can not log on to it and I can not use it on the forums.

The reason given was “billing problems”.

However, Linden Lab is holding 63000 US$ they owe me and all my account balances are positive. I also have valid PayPal billing agreement.

The excuse used is obviously that my main account balance was negative for short time (about one day) after I was suddenly charged 25000 US$ at once for auction and tier. It only took me hours to transfer money to take care of 20000 US$ of this. At -4900 US$ I asked Linden Lab to use money from my second account “Anshee Chung”. On that account there is +13000 US$. This money was used by Linden Lab, but my account was still banned. Continue reading →

Check out this bit of biomimicry goodness from EurekAlert (Link):

Being able to hear the smallest of noises is a matter of life or death for many insects, but for the scientists studying their hearing systems understanding how insect ears can be so sensitive could lead to new microphones able to capture and analyse extremely faint sounds.

Having worked on the design of a mosquito trap that uses a combination of sensory attractors (heat, visual pattern, sound, carbon monoxide), this one makes me light up like one of those bug zappers. Maybe because I’ve also done work for microphone manufacturer Audio-Technica. Wild how things manage to relate.

By the way, what are they feeding those people in Bristol? Seems they’re leading the world in a number of areas related to biomimicry. I’m also on their listserv, so I see plenty of other stuff as well. Busy little bees over there.

via Boing Boing

I’ve been seeing more and more mention of illuminated fabrics. Wired has an article today on the stuff, but I’ve previously seen this on other sites. So rather than direct you anywhere specifically, I’ll just suggest you visit the loop.pH website (Link) where I found the above image. There’s all kinds, but this “history” exploration is what I enjoy most (and I’m fairly certain I read about this quite a while ago).

{Image Copyright © 2003 – 2006 by Loop.pH Ltd.}

Earlier this week I received an email from Michael Frumin, R&D Technical Director at Eyebeam Openlab and the man responsible for the OGLE geometry capture utility. Turns out he’d managed to map textures onto captured geometry. Unfortunately, the sample he sent was a Maya 6.5 file and I’m on 5.0.1. No joy.

Well, he’s just sent word that there’s now an update to OGLE (Link). Those of us so inclined can give it a try. It’s not automatic, but it hopefully it won’t be too difficult to get that Doom3 sentry bot (reLink) mapped and displaced. Now I just have to map out some time…

From UGS’s Monday press release (Link):

Tecnomatix 7.6 leverages a natural extension of the Teamcenter PLM backbone, enabling tight collaboration across the design/build process where manufacturing and design engineers can create and plan production processes concurrent with product design. Moreover, with Tecnomatix 7.6 manufacturers can virtually create, plan, validate and execute production processes, for workcells, machines, production lines and entire plants before purchasing and commissioning a single piece of physical equipment.”
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Extending the knowledge capture, management and distribution features of Teamcenter into process planning and the production environment provides a virtual ‘manufacturing backbone’ to support the world-class functionality of Tecnomatix.
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The result is a more complete PLM solution that shares data models between product and process design and manufacturing execution with feedback loops that facilitate continuous process improvement and support global innovation networks.

If you’re familiar with the robot factory in The Sims, this starts to sound like that kind of capability. Only the robots on the screen are getting built in some factory … somewhere. Parts of it may even be fabbed. Continue reading →